Marlborough Region

The beauty of the wilderness area around the Nelson Lakes touched even seasoned explorers like Julius von Haast, who commented in 1859, 'I am sure that the time is not far distant when this spot will become the favourite abode of those whose means and leisure will permit them to admire picturesque scenery.' However when the first early British immigrants came to New Zealand, they wanted to run sheep and cattle on flat grasslands and to build their houses and churches on level ground, so most of the European explorers in the South Island were busy looking for large inland plains. For over a century the main route south from Nelson for the coaches and farmers driving stock, followed the Wairau River along the river valleys to Tophouse near the Nelson Lakes. The route between the Wairau and Nelson was originally discovered in 1842 by a young surveyor named John Cotterell who got as far south as the Nelson Lakes and had climbed the St Arnaud Range hoping to see an inland plain. Instead he was dismayed to find rows of mountain ranges stretching as far as the eye could see. Cotterell was later killed in a skirmish after joining a group of settlers attempting to arrest Te Rauparaha and his warriors and his dream of finding flat pasture lands was soon replaced by the quest for gold as miners worked their way along the river valleys towards Lakes Rotoroa and Rotoiti.

Marlborough - Brayshaw

1brayshaw heritage park

From the centre of Blenheim follow Main Road west from the Blenheim onto Maxwell Road 2.5 km and turn right onto New Renwick Road. The entry to the park is on the left.
Only 5 minutes drive from the town centre, this 6 ha park features a colonial village that has been recreated complete with furnished cottages and authentically stocked shops. You can take a stroll down the street and see what Blenheim looked like in the early days as well as visiting the Marlborough District Museum. The park also features vintage cars, a collection of drays and buggies and a huge display of early farming machinery and equipment including numerous vintage tractors.

2Renwick

From Blenheim head west on SH6 and drive west 10 km to Renwick via Woodbourne. The aerodrome at Woodburne was the starting point on 13 October 1928 for the first east to west crossing of the Tasman by plane. Charles Kingsford-Smith made the pioneering flight in the Southern Cross, having already completed the first west to east crossing when he landed at Wigram in Christchurch a few weeks earlier.
Many of the historic homesteads in Renwick date back to the early days of sheep farming in Marlborough, including the Langly Dale Station where the original homestead and outbuildings still survive. The Renwick museum, located on the main road, features relics from the early days of European settlement in the area including a number of houses and a reconstruction of an old tavern. You can also visit the Cork & Keg on Inkerman Street, styled after an old English pub, complete with its own brew of 'Renwick' beers and cider.

marlborough wine trail

Marlborough is the largest grape-growing region in New Zealand. Although grape vines were planted here as early as the 1870s, it was a century later when the region achieved recognition and prominence as one of the world’s premier wine growing districts. About 20 wineries near Blenheim produce a variety of wines but the area is internationally acclaimed for its sauvignon blancs. Most wineries are open daily and can be found easily with the Marlborough Winemakers Wine Trail Guide available from the Blenheim I-Site in the Railway Station on State Highway 1. The landscape is flat and you can even try hiring a bike and cycling from one vineyard to another. There is plenty of accommodation in the area and most of the wineries offer lunch and dinner as well as wine tasting. Each year Montana's Brancott Estate hosts the famous Marlborough Food and Wine Festival during the second weekend in February.

3tophouse

From Renwick continue 87.5 km west on SH 63 along the Wairau Valley and turn right onto the Korere Tophouse road. Drive 3.6 km north and turn right then continue 0.5 km to the Tophouse.
This short detour to the Tophouse is at the start of a long winding route that was used to drive sheep from Nelson through to the Wairau Valley during the early days of European settlement. The drovers would take their sheep to better farming land in Marlborough and the Canterbury plains by following the rivers to their source to avoid making dangerous crossings further down. This saved the lives of many sheep and drovers and created many of the future routes for roads in the area. Ned James an ex-ship carpenter, built most of the accomodation houses on the route. The cob-walled Tophouse was the last and the biggest and was used as a staging post for horse-drawn coaches, becoming one of the first hotels in Marlborough. To the north the Douglas fir and radiata pines that make up the Golden Downs State Forest cover large parts of the catchment areas of the Motueka, Waiiti, Tadmor and Sherry Rivers.

Lake Rotoiti

4lake rotoiti

Return to SH 63, turn right and drive west 4.6 km to St Arnaud. Turn left off the main highway and follow Kerr Bay Road past the Park Headquarters down to the edge of Lake Rotoiti.
A product of thousands of years of glaciation, the Nelson Lakes were carved out by ancient glaciers millions of years ago. The rocks that make up the mountains in the park are sandstone and greywacke that was uplifted from the sea floor about 200 million years ago. During the ice ages the rock was scraped and gouged away by huge slow moving rivers of ice, creating the steep valley walls that can be seen today as well as the deep depressions that later filled with water to become the Nelson Lakes. Much of the area's beauty lies in the native forests that cover the river valleys and stretch deep into the mountains. A good way to experience these forests is on some of the short walks that follow the shoreline of the lake. The Bellbird and Honeydew Walks run through moss-covered beech forest to the east of the visitor centre at St Arnaud while the Brunner Peninsula Nature Walk heads west through the forest across a moraine formed by the glacier that created Lake Rotoiti. The glacier carried huge quantities of rock down from the mountains, dumping it off the end of the ice flow to form a huge natural rock wall that was left behind when the glacier retreated. This glacial moraine later created a natural dam behind which the lake formed and which now makes up the peninsula at the edge of Lake Rotoiti. Originally a small settlement and mining centre, St Arnaud is now the headquarters for Nelson Lakes National Park. An old sluice gun stands as a reminder of the hardy miners who worked their way up the river valleys in search of the 'mother lodes' of gold. Today the lake is popular for swimming and yachting, and carries plentiful stocks of brown trout.

mt robert

The access road to Mt Robert is on the left another 2 km west on SH63.
Mt Robert rises above the south-western shoreline of Lake Rotoiti. A huge fracture in the earth's crust known as the Alpine Fault runs right through this area. Over millions of years the continents have been moving along these fault lines which separate the earth's crust into vast plates that float like islands on an underlying mantle of molten rock. It was on the slopes of Mt Robert that the German geologist Julius von Haast stood when he made his observation that the landforms to the west must have moved over time. He arrived at his own theory of an alpine fault line to explain this movement in the land, coming to this conclusion more than a century before the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift had been developed. It takes about 2 hours to walk up the zig-zagging Pinchgut Track onto the slopes of Mt Robert where you can get magnificent views across the lake and into the surrounding mountains from the beautiful sub alpine tussock grasslands on the summit ridge.

Lake Rotoroa lies in the mountains of Nelson Lakes National Park

5lake rotoroa

Return to SH63 and drive northwest 25 km to Kawatiri, turn left onto SH6 and travel west 6 km to Gowanbridge. Turn left onto Gowan Valley Road and drive south 11 km to Lake Rotoroa.
Lake Rotoroa is a popular venue for trout fishing Visitors can explore the lakeshore on the Flower Brothers Walk and the Rotoroa Nature Walk, two easy 20-minute walks through the forest near Lake Rotoroa. The forest canopy is alive with a wonderful variety of birds including the tiny rifleman, tui, robins, kaka and the inquisitive little fantails that can often be seen flitting along beside people walking along the forest trails. There are also many kinds of insects and lizards living among the luxuriant ferns, mosses and lichens that thrive in the low light that filters through to the forest floor. You can also walk up the Porika 4WD Track for views across the lake.