Tākaka Hill

Where it sits. Tākaka Hill is the barrier between Tasman Bay and Golden Bay in the northwest of the South Island, and State Highway 60 crosses it by climbing from sea level at Riwaka to a summit of about 791 metres in a sustained series of switchbacks, then dropping just as steeply into the Tākaka valley on the far side. It is the only road link to Golden Bay, which gives it a significance out of all proportion to its height: when the hill closes, Tākaka, Collingwood and Farewell Spit are cut off from the rest of the country by land. The drive is roughly thirty kilometres and takes about forty-five minutes, and campervan drivers arrive at the far end noticeably quieter than they set off.

Marble Mountain. The hill is built of Arthur Marble, a band of Ordovician limestone metamorphosed under pressure and then worked on by rain for a very long time. The result is classic karst: bare weathered outcrops standing out of the pasture like broken teeth, sinkholes in the paddocks, disappearing streams, and an extensive cave system underneath. Marble from the Tākaka quarries was used in buildings across New Zealand, including Nelson's Christ Church Cathedral and the Parliament complex in Wellington. Two features stand out. Ngarua Caves, near the summit, are open for guided tours and contain flowstone formations and the bones of moa that fell into the shafts and could not climb out. And Harwoods Hole, reached by a forty-five-minute walk from the Canaan Downs car park, is the deepest vertical shaft in the country at about 176 metres — an unfenced, unguarded hole in the forest floor into which a stone dropped takes an unpleasantly long time to be heard. The viewpoint above it is safe; the rim is not, and people have died there.

On screen. The pine plantation and open tussock country at Canaan Downs, on the hill's summit plateau, stood in for the Chetwood Forest in The Fellowship of the Ring — the wooded country the hobbits cross after leaving the Shire, including the sequence in which Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin scramble off the road and hide beneath the roots of a large tree while a Black Rider stops directly above them, sniffing. It was shot on the forest floor at Canaan, with the root cavity built as a set piece against a real tree. Worth being straightforward about the state of the site now: the plantation has been logged and the summit plateau was severely damaged by Cyclone Gita in February 2018, which brought down trees and triggered slips across the hill and closed the highway. The specific tree is gone and the immediate landscape no longer resembles what is on screen.

What you actually see today. From the road, a series of viewpoints — Hawkes Lookout on the Riwaka side, with a short boardwalk to a platform over the valley, and the summit pull-offs looking back across Tasman Bay to the Abel Tasman coastline. On top, an unexpected plateau of open country, marble outcrops, beech remnants and the unsealed Canaan Road running eleven kilometres to the Canaan Downs campsite and the Harwoods Hole track. The Tākaka Hill Walkway makes a loop of two to three hours through karst and forest. The Riwaka Resurgence, at the foot of the hill on the Motueka side, is where the Riwaka River comes back out of the mountain in a deep, cold, extraordinarily clear pool, a short walk from the road and one of the best short stops in the district. Cave systems here are the province of experienced cavers only.

Getting there and timing. The hill sits about forty minutes from Motueka and an hour and a quarter from Nelson. The highway is sealed, well engineered and steep, with tight radius corners, frequent trucks and no room for error on the outside line; heavy vehicles use low gear both ways. Fog sits on the summit often, particularly in the morning, and the road can ice in winter. The Canaan Road is unsealed, narrow and rutted, and is not suitable for large campervans; the campsite there is basic, with no water supply. There is no fuel on the hill itself. Golden Bay on the far side rewards the drive, but travellers should always check road status before crossing in bad weather, because a closure means a genuinely long wait rather than a detour.