Walk #119, 26th March 2024
A walk up some 250 steps to the Cape Palliser Lighthouse on the southernmost point of the North Island. The views are awesome but it was too cloudy to see the South Island on the day we visited.
The 5km stretch of road from Ngawi to Cape Palliser is interesting, there are two concrete fords to drive over. Also a seal colony which we didn’t see.
Stone walled gardens
There were stone walled gardens at Cape Palliser.
… Adkin (1955) drew attention to an apparently high density of settlement in eastern Palliser Bay and found artifacts of typical archaic forms, many of which ended up in private hands or in the Museum of New Zealand collection (Leach 1981). Four burials, one with a shark’s tooth necklace, were excavated at the mouth of the Pararaki River in the 1950s and 1960s (Davis 1959;Cairns 1971; Leach 1981; Walton 1994). Wellman (1962b) describes a wave-cut section about 3 km west of Cape Palliser lighthouse with moa bone (Euryapteryx geranoides) and oven stones near the top. … Source ResearchGate
The land may have been abandoned because of invasion, seismic activity or a tsunami in the 16th century or early 17th century.
Walk: Wairarapa 7
Links
Fur seals, crayfish and bulldozers: Off-the-beaten track in Cape Palliser
Cape Palliser 2017 by Drones Manawatu
NZShortWalks 
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