The Sooke Region Museum & Local Makers
The region's story in three places — a pioneer museum with a working forge and two local studios — and why to start a visit here.
No. 1 Where the town keeps its stories
Sooke is best known for beaches, old-growth forest, and salmon — but tucked between the trailheads and the harbour are a handful of cultural spaces that reveal what shaped this community. Three are worth your time.
Sooke Region Museum doesn't announce itself loudly, which is part of its charm. Step inside and you'll find a genuinely varied collection: pioneer clothing, Indigenous weavings, farming equipment, natural history specimens, and exploration records that trace the region's past from the T'Sou-ke Nation forward through the logging and fishing eras. The grounds extend the story outdoors — most notably with a working blacksmith shop where volunteers demonstrate the forge on select days, hammering iron much as settlers would have a century ago. The collection refreshes regularly through ongoing donations, so a second visit rarely repeats the first.
Marshall-Inman Gallery sits on a working llama farm, which should tell you something about the spirit of Sooke's arts scene. Basil and Glenys Marshall-Inman produce handcrafted furniture, woodwork, and pottery — most of it available to buy — and offer informal studio tours that take you behind the finished pieces. For anyone who works in ceramics themselves, it's the kind of visit that turns instructive as well as enjoyable. The llamas, for their part, draw visitors who weren't expecting to care about pottery at all and leave converted.
Barking Dog Studio has the feel of a genuine small-town creative space — well-loved by locals and increasingly found by visitors. Browse a curated selection of gifts and one-off pieces, or bring in a tired chair or table for refinishing with Fat Paint, a specialty furniture paint the studio stocks and works with. It's the kind of place built on real character rather than footfall, and that shows in the welcome.
Taken together, these three spaces do something a trail map can't: they put names, hands, and history to the coast you've been walking through. The Sooke Fine Arts Show, held every summer, draws on the same deep well of local craft — but for the year-round picture of who makes things here and why, the museum and its neighbouring studios are where to start.
Small towns keep their character in places like these.
None of these venues will consume a full day. A morning moving between them — the museum's pioneer artefacts, the Marshall-Inman farm, the friendly clutter of Barking Dog — gives you a Sooke that the beaches alone don't show. Small towns keep their character in places like these.