Castle Hill, New Zealand

Where it sits. Castle Hill is a basin, a high-country station and a scatter of limestone tors at about 700 metres above sea level in inland Canterbury, on State Highway 73 between Springfield and Arthur's Pass. The rock that gives the place its name stands in a paddock-like bowl ringed by the Torlesse and Craigieburn ranges, an hour and a half by road west of Christchurch. The publicly accessible rocks lie within the Kura Tāwhiti Conservation Area, reached by a short track from a car park directly off the highway; the surrounding farmland is private. The name came from early settlers who thought the grey blocks looked like the ruins of a decayed stone castle, an impression that holds up in flat evening light when the tors throw long shadows across the tussock.

The story behind it. The limestone formed on a sea floor in the Oligocene, roughly 25 million years ago, and was lifted with the rest of the basin as the Southern Alps rose. Weathering has since carved it into rounded towers, honeycombed overhangs and slots wide enough to walk through. For Ngāi Tahu the place is Kura Tāwhiti, a name usually rendered as "the treasure from a distant land", associated with the cultivation and storage of kūmara at the limit of its range; the site holds early charcoal rock drawings and is a wāhi tapu managed jointly with the Department of Conservation. European pastoralists arrived in the 1850s: the Porter brothers established the station, and it later passed to the brothers John and Charles Enys. John Enys was a serious entomologist and a friend of the novelist Samuel Butler, who farmed nearby. Castle Hill limestone was quarried for building — the front of ChristChurch Cathedral in Christchurch was cut from it. Castle Hill Village, the cluster of holiday houses just north of the Thomas River, was laid out in 1982 by the then station owner John Reid.

On screen, carefully. Visitor traffic through the basin rose sharply after The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), and Castle Hill is frequently described as the Narnia battlefield. It was not. The climactic battle between Aslan's army and the White Witch's forces was staged on the neighbouring Flock Hill station, a separate property a short distance up the highway, during the production's South Island leg in November and December 2004. What Castle Hill offers is the same geology, the same tussock and the same mountain backdrop, freely accessible and without the station's climbing registration requirements — which is precisely why so many visitors photograph it and assume they are standing where the cameras stood.

What you actually see today. A loop track of about a kilometre and a half climbs from the highway car park into the main cluster of tors in twenty to forty minutes, and walkers can wander freely among them on marked ground; interpretation panels at the entrance set out the site's cultural significance and the conditions of access. The area is regarded as the centre of New Zealand's bouldering scene: hundreds of problems on grey water-worn limestone, with crash pads spread out on the grass on any fine weekend. Climbers are asked to keep off specific formations of cultural significance and to avoid chalking near rock-drawing sites. Sheep graze the surrounding paddocks, harriers hunt the tussock, and in spring the ground is dotted with alpine daisies. The rock stays warm well into the evening and the light in the hour before sunset is the reason so many photographers time their drive for late afternoon.

Getting there and timing. The drive from Christchurch takes roughly 90 minutes over Porters Pass, and the highway carries the traffic bound for Arthur's Pass and the West Coast, so the car park fills fast in January. There is a toilet at the reserve, but no shop or café; the village has no public services beyond a hall and a playground. Snow lies in the basin through much of winter and the tors look their most dramatic under a light fall, though the access track can be icy and the wind bitter. Bring layers whatever the forecast: the basin sits in the rain shadow of the Alps and swings quickly from still and hot to a hard nor'wester.

Nearby. Cave Stream Scenic Reserve, where a 594-metre limestone cave can be walked end to end in cold thigh-deep water, is five minutes north. Lake Pearson, four club skifields in the Craigieburn Range and the beech forest tracks of Craigieburn Forest Park are all within twenty minutes, and Arthur's Pass National Park is another 40 kilometres west along the same highway. The basin also holds one of the country's more unusual botanical curiosities, the Castle Hill buttercup, a limestone specialist found naturally in only a few hectares of this valley and nowhere else on earth, which is another reason the conservation area asks visitors to keep to the tracks between the rocks.