After leaving Otaki Forks, we head down the Gorge Road back to SH1, stopping off at the local “Hadrian’s wall”, the stone walls of Shield’s Flat.
Shields Flat gets its name from Irishman Patrick ‘Paddy’ Shields, who, along with his wife Jean and their 10 children, moved to the gorge in 1933 after his pig farm in Johnsonville failed due to an outbreak of swine fever. He kept sheep on the farm and grew potatoes.
Some dry stone walls were built during the Great Depression of the 1930s as a result of a government scheme to provide relief work for the unemployed. Farmers and landowners would pay a worker a few shillings a week for ‘development work’, with the Unemployment Board making up the rest of the wage to 9 shillings a week (equivalent to about $83 per week in 2010). Although much of the relief work was seen as trivial, non-productive and demoralising for the workers, it did provide a means of income when there was little else available.
It is likely the walls on Shields Flat were built by a party of relief workers to rid the plains of greywacke boulders, washed down from the Tararua Ranges by the Otaki River. These cumbersome ‘Hautere turnips’, as they were called, were first sorted and placed in huge heaps before being used to make walls.
Turning right onto SH1, we are soon in the town of Otaki, where a welcome lunch is enjoyed at a streetside restaurant. Then, across the way to visit the olde time style Otaki railway station, which we’d seen almost three years ago when we passed through on the Overlander Express en route to Auckland.
Looking southwards to Wellington on the main (and only) platform of the old time station, which was restored in 1999.
Hi, handsome. We have a hotel in Otaki.
Anyone with luggage for the 4:50 from Wellington?
From here, on the way home, we strolled along the Waikanae/Peka Peka beach, examining some of the huge quantities of driftwood washed out of the sea.
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