Kepler Mire

Where it sits. Kepler Mire is a large peat wetland on the floor of the Te Anau basin in Southland, lying between Lake Te Anau and Lake Manapouri on the flats east of the Kepler Mountains and west of the Waiau River. The Manapouri-Te Anau Road runs along its eastern side, so most people drive past it without registering what it is: an open, treeless expanse of rust-coloured and olive vegetation, low and flat, with the Fiordland ranges rising abruptly behind it. It is one of the largest and least modified peatlands remaining in the southern South Island, and it survives largely because the ground is too wet and too acidic to have been worth draining.

What a mire actually is. Peat forms where plant material accumulates faster than it decays, which in this climate means where the ground is permanently waterlogged and the water is acidic and low in nutrients. Kepler Mire has been building for thousands of years since the last glaciation, and its surface is a mosaic of wire rush, sphagnum moss, red tussock, stunted mānuka and sundews — carnivorous plants that make up for the nutrient-poor substrate by trapping insects. The water table sits at or near the surface across most of the mire, so the ground behaves like a sponge rather than soil. Peatlands of this kind are globally significant carbon stores and, in New Zealand, are among the most heavily reduced ecosystems: the great majority of the country's lowland wetlands have been drained since European settlement. Kepler is a rare survivor of a landscape type that once covered much of the Southland plains.

On screen. The Dead Marshes of The Two Towers — where Gollum leads Frodo and Sam across a drowned battlefield and Frodo is drawn down toward the faces in the water — were filmed at Kepler Mire. The choice makes complete sense on the ground: the mire is flat, treeless and open to the sky, with standing water among tussock and no modern feature in any direction, and the whole basin regularly fills with low cloud and mist that comes off Lake Te Anau. The corpse-lights, the drowned faces and the pools of the finished sequence were built in effects and studio work; what the location supplied was the ground, the vegetation and the specific quality of dead, flat, sourceless light that Fiordland produces on an overcast day. Nothing was built here and nothing remains.

Why you should look rather than walk. This is the honest part. Kepler Mire is not a visitor attraction. It has no car park, no interpretation panel, no boardwalk and no formed track, and it is managed as a conservation area for its ecological values rather than for recreation. Walking into a peat bog does real and slow-healing damage — footfall compresses the peat and breaks the moss surface, and the vegetation takes years to recover — quite apart from the practical reality that the ground will not hold your weight in many places and you will go in to the thigh. Visitors who want to understand it should stop in a safe pull-off on the Manapouri road and look, or approach the general area on the formed tracks nearby. Anyone arriving with a plan to find the exact camera position should reconsider; there is no marked spot, and the surface is the fragile thing being protected.

What is nearby, and worth doing instead. The Kepler Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks, begins at the Lake Te Anau control gates a short drive north and makes a sixty-kilometre loop over the Kepler Mountains, with the Rainbow Reach swing bridge over the Waiau providing an easy few hours of formed track along the river and through beech forest at the mire's northern end. The Waiau River itself, running from Lake Te Anau to Lake Manapouri, doubled for the River Anduin in the trilogy and can be walked beside, jetboated or fished. Te Anau, ten minutes north, has the Department of Conservation visitor centre, the Te Anau Bird Sanctuary where takahē can be seen, and the glowworm caves across the lake.

Getting there and timing. Kepler Mire lies about ten to fifteen minutes south of Te Anau on State Highway 95 toward Manapouri. There is no signposted access and no facility of any kind at the mire. The nearest services, fuel and accommodation are in Te Anau or Manapouri. Sandflies are constant. The site reads best under exactly the conditions it was filmed in — low cloud, no wind, flat light — which in Fiordland means that a grey day is not a wasted one.