Waitarere Beach

Where it sits. Waitārere Beach is a small settlement on the Tasman Sea coast of the Horowhenua district, about ten kilometres northwest of Levin and roughly an hour and a half north of Wellington. The coast here is one long, straight, shallow-shelving strand of grey sand running unbroken for tens of kilometres between the Manawatū and Ōtaki river mouths, backed by a wide belt of consolidated dunes. Inland from the dunes, and pressing right up to the back of the village, stands Waitārere Forest — several thousand hectares of planted radiata pine laid out in blocks on the old sand country. On a clear day the Tararua Range rises to the east behind it all, and the South Island shows as a low line across Cook Strait to the south.

Why the forest is there. The dunes behind this coast were once mobile, drifting inland over farmland in westerly gales and burying pasture and fences. From the 1920s the state forest service planted pines across the sand in a large-scale stabilisation programme, and the result is a working plantation with an unusual character: tall, straight, evenly spaced trunks over a mostly bare needle floor, cut through by sandy fire breaks and forestry roads, with the dune topography still legible underneath. It is not native bush and makes no pretence of being — it is a managed crop, harvested and replanted in rotation — but the effect of walking into it is genuinely uncanny, because it looks like nowhere else in New Zealand.

On screen. That uncanniness is exactly what Peter Jackson's production wanted. Waitārere Forest was used for two separate pieces of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings, both of them woodland that had to look explicitly un-New Zealand:

• The Trollshaws in The Fellowship of the Ring — the broken forest north of Rivendell where Aragorn leads the hobbits past the three stone trolls, petrified since Bilbo's journey, in the extended edition.
• Osgiliath Wood in The Two Towers — the country Frodo, Sam and Gollum move through after leaving Faramir's company, on the approach toward the ruined city.

Neither sequence required a built set beyond dressing: the pines supplied the vertical columns and open sightlines, the sandy floor took footprints convincingly, and the absence of tree ferns and nīkau meant the frame carried no New Zealand signature. The blocks used have since been through harvest cycles, so the specific stands seen on film no longer exist in the same form — a plantation is a crop, and this one has been cut and replanted since 2001.

What you actually see today. The village is modest: a few hundred permanent residents, a store, a campground, a surf club and a long line of holiday houses that fills up over Christmas. Vehicles are permitted on parts of the beach, which is a Horowhenua tradition and a source of local argument. At low tide, the skeletal iron ribs of the Hydrabad sometimes emerge from the sand a short walk north of the main access — a 1,000-tonne iron sailing ship driven ashore in a June 1878 gale, stranded, and never refloated. It has been slowly swallowed and re-exposed by the moving sand ever since, and whether you see anything of it depends entirely on the state of the beach that season.

Walking and riding. Forestry roads and marked tracks run through the plantation from the edge of the village, used by walkers, mountain bikers and horse riders — the district has a strong equestrian culture and horses on the beach at dawn are a common sight. Signage at the entrance points out the film connection. Because it is an active forestry operation, sections close for harvesting without much notice, and logging trucks use the roads; the posted restrictions are worth respecting. The Manawatū Estuary at Foxton Beach, half an hour north, is a wetland of international importance for migratory wading birds and makes a natural pairing.

Getting there and timing. Waitārere is reached by a short signposted turnoff from State Highway 1 north of Levin; there is no useful public transport and a car is required. Summer brings warm water by New Zealand standards, long evenings and a west-facing beach that takes the full sunset. Winter is bleak, windy and empty, which some people prefer. The surf is variable and there are rips; the beach is patrolled by the surf club only during the summer season, and swimming outside those hours and flags carries real risk on this stretch of coast.