Waipara Riverside Park

Vineyards

The WAIPARA VALLEY is one of NZ's newest and most rapidly expanding wine areas. There are many vineyards in the region - the closest being established over the fence from the Waipara Riverside Park! In addition to vineyards, olive and nut groves are also established on the fertile river beds.

The Waipara River

The Waipara is a very small river by Canterbury standards and is less than 70km’s in length.
It rises in the foothills of the Southern Alps to the west and enters the sea in the northern end of Amberley Beach. For much of its length, the Waipara has a very winding course, including its cut through the relatively soft limestones and mudstones of the Weka Pass area where it flows along a deep gorge. This is one of its most unusual features.
Gorges are usually cut in a straight line by young fast flowing rivers coming down from steep mountains. This swift water has the power to cut deep into the underlying rock. Winding rivers are generally found on flat plains - they are older rivers, which flow slowly, meandering from side to side. They have little cutting power, so there has to be a special reason for the Waipara River to flow through a gorge in meanders.
The reason is that the Waipara River is old. It originally flowed slowly across flattish land and this is when its meandering course developed.
Then there was a period of mountain building during which the limestone - mudstone hills of the Weka Pass were uplifted, as were some other marine rocks nearer the mouth of the river. The river had no option but to cut through this rising land and was able to cut down at about the same rate as the land rose. Because it already had a well-established bed, it continued to flow in this while it cut its gorge so that the old pattern of meanders was superimposed on the new hilly landscape.
The Waipara River especially in summer, is not very deep and is usually sun-warmed, so it is pleasant to walk up its course in various places. Many bits and pieces can be collected during such a walk, pieces of fossils out of the hills, and often quite good examples of petrified wood. Two places on the Waipara River which are worth a special visit are the Double Corner shell beds which contain numerous fossils, and the “Saurian” concretions further up in the gorge, where many prehistoric reptile remains have been found.
The Boys' Brigade (Waipara Riverside Park) has formed a natural swimming hole in the Waipara river which is popular with locals and visitors alike in the summer months for swimming and canoeing.

Limestone Formations

When you travel through the Weka Pass, you cannot help noticing the outcrops of limestone, which often form strange and interesting shapes.
“Frog Rock” and “The Seal” are two of the best known and can be seen easily from the road.
Most limestone is composed of the remains (usually the shells) of marine animals, which are deposited in thick layers, or beds on the bottom of the ocean, when the creatures die. Over millions of years, these deposits form into a solid rock, limestone. Sometimes whole shells can be seen in the rock and also occasional fossils of other animals, bones or teeth.
Although it was laid down beneath the sea many millions of years ago, the limestone in the Weka Pass area was lifted up and exposed by a series of great earth movements. During the process the beds were tipped up and tilted at various angles; just as we sometimes see concrete slabs that have been tossed up during an earthquake.
There are three different types of limestone in Weka Pass.
The oldest called the “Amberley limestone” is found at the lowest level and has the next oldest the “Weka Pass limestone” sitting right on top of it. You can see this very clearly about the middle of the Weka Pass, where roadworks in the last few years have cut into a limestone bank on the side of the road. The grey “Weka Pass stone” which has an even texture and is very thick is quite easily distinguished from the “Amberley stone” underneath, which is creamier in colour and forms a whole series of little blocks - a bit like a stone wall. The “frog” and “seal” are weathered out of the “Weka Pass stone”.
The youngest limestone in the Weka Pass is called the “Mt Brown limestone” and forms a hard layer on the tops of all the hills through the pass. “Mt Brown” beds are thinner than the other limestones, they are also sandier, and usually a yellowish colour.
“Mt Brown limestone” contains a lot of shell fossils and the remains of other marine creatures, all clearly visible in the rock.

GLENMARK

George Henry Moore, “Scabby” Moore of Glenmark (1812 - 1905) amassed one of the country’s largest fortunes on his Glenmark estate, in his day perhaps the most valuable in Canterbury.
He once described his 92,000 sheep mustered for shearing:
“They covered in a close mass a hill 500 feet high and looked from a distance like a mass of maggots on a piece of rotten meat, continually on the move”.
Moore was a curiously contradictory character. He allowed his sheep to remain thick with scab, in one year alone paying fines of $2400, yet would walk to Christchurch with a tent on his back to save the cost of a night’s accommodation. He was otherwise regarded as a progressive farmer. When the “doomsday book” of 1885 was published he was listed as the wealthiest settler, ahead of even his near neighbour, the affluent “Ready Money” Robinson.
In 1866 a huge deposit of Moa bones was found during the draining of a swamp at Glenmark. They formed the foundation of the Canterbury Museum’s world famous collection.
The mansion Moore built in the seven years from 1881 cost $78,000. Complete with high stone walls, battlements and fixtures imported from Europe, the castle-like homestead overlooked an artificial lake where Moore’s daughter would each week feed some 300 home baked loaves of bread to the ducks, swans and peacocks.
The homestead was gutted by fire in 1890, not two years after its completion: the artificial lake has ceased to be, but the spacious out buildings still stand near the managers delightful old house. By the formal entrance is a picturesque Gatekeepers cottage, completed before the mansion and built in an appropriate style. The spacious stables are among the most impressive in the country and are classified “A” by the Historic Places Trust.
After Moore’s death, his daughter built St Pauls’ church (north of Waipara on State Highway 1) in memory of her father. Built of brick, it contains a carillon, pipe-organ and stained glass windows - one of which commemorates her husband, Dr Townend.

Pyramid Valley Moa Swamp

The first Moa skeletons to be recovered from Pyramid Valley were found in 1938 when the owner of the farm dug into the soft swamp to bury a draught horse. He unearthed three enormous leg bones of the biggest of all the Moas, the Dinornis Maximus. Canterbury Museum was informed and realised what an important discovery this could be because the swamp apparently contained the remains of individual birds which, up until that time had been found only rarely.
By 1941 they had recovered 50, almost complete, skeletons of four different Moa species. Other excavations have been carried out since, and today Canterbury Museum has the best collection of Moa skeletons in the world - many of them from the Pyramid Valley.
Moa is the popular name for the huge flightless birds, which once lived in New Zealand. They ranged from one to three metres in height and were closely related to the Kiwis, as well as some birds from other countries such as Ostriches and Emu’s. They existed in New Zealand for millions of years before the arrival of humans. When the first Europeans arrived they had been extinct for some centuries as a result of hunting by the early Polynesians who gathered their eggs and burnt off the forest they lived in.
However, the Moas that died in Pyramid Valley swamp were trapped about 4000 years ago, long before the arrival of man in this country. After their death, their bones were preserved in the mud. Besides Moa bones, the mud contains the remains of many other forest birds such as the Kiwi and pigeons. This indicates that there was once a forest all around the swamp. There are also bones of a giant extinct eagle which was trapped when it came down to feed on the Moa carcases.
Because Pyramid Valley is such an important scientific site it is now protected by a Queen Elizabeth II National Trust open space covenant so that its treasures can be preserved for future generations of New Zealanders.

Fossils

The Double Corner shell beds occur on either side of the lower Waipara River gorge, at the ‘horse-shoe’(a deep meander loop) about seven kilometres upstream from the river mouth. Double Corner is an early European name for the area. They are best reached by driving to the lower Waipara bridge at Teviotdale and from there walking upstream. This is an easy walk but the river has to be waded once or twice. In the summer it is seldom more than 30 centimetres deep and lukewarm.
As may be guessed from the name, the beds, which consist of fine brown sands, are rich in shell fossils, mostly molluscs. These belong to the Miocene period of geological history and are about twelve million years old.
Viewed from a distance, it can be seen that the beds are not lying flat although they would have originally been laid down level under the sea, however they were tilted and uplifted over time and now dip down to the west.
There are several different levels in the shell beds, each of which has a variety of shells. If these are examined closely it can be seen that the sequence of the levels is repeated. This is because a ‘fault’ or break in the rocks run across the river in this area. When the rocks have moved along this fault, the various shell beds have slid up and over each other so that the two areas which were originally lying side by side are now piled up, one on top of the other.
This is a good place to collect fossil shells and although most of them belong to species which are now extinct, they can be compared to similar shells which are found on the beach today. By doing this it is possible to decide what sort of environment they would have lived in when they were alive.
One of the most interesting beds consists of thousands of tiny bivalve shells only a few millimetres across. They belong to a species called Turia and great number of them have tiny holes in their shells. These holes were made by a carnivorous, snail-like molluscs which bored through the shell of the living Turia and ate the animal inside.

Saurian Concretions

In 1859, Thomas Cockburn Hood discovered fossil Saurian (reptile) bones in the Waipara River. They were imbedded in large boulders, or concretions, exposed in the steep banks of the river where it cuts through a gorge in the Weka Pass area. The concretions were found in sediments of cretaceous age (which means they were about 70 million years old) and the bone they contained belonged to a plesiosaur, a kind of giant extinct marine reptile, and a relative of the dinosaurs.
In 1861, Julius Haast was appointed Canterbury provincial geologist. Haast was most interested in Hood’s discovery and in 1866 he travelled to the Waipara area, with a stonemason to help him break open the concretions which contained the fossils. On this trip he was able to make quite a collection of saurian bones from Bobys Creek, a tributary of the Waipara River.
Over the next few years quantities of saurian fossils, belonging to different species of reptiles, were discovered in the Waipara by several different collectors, while some of these were placed in the Canterbury and Wellington (colonial) museums, many were sent overseas, although Haast objected strongly about them leaving the country.
One very important collection was sent on the ship Matoaka, which sailed from Canterbury on May 13th 1869 and was never to be seen again. Fortunately Haast arranged to have a detailed record of the fossils, with drawings made as they were lost at sea. The two most important kinds of reptile which have been found in the Waipara concretions are plesiosaurs and mosasaurs.
Plesiosaurs grew up to 15 metres in length with broad, flat bodies and long flexible necks with a small head. They swam by “rowing” with their paddle-like limbs. Now extinct, they have no known living relatives. Mosasaurs were a sort of large marine lizard up to 12 metres in length. They had long heads with numerous teeth, stout necks and long, slim bodies and tails, the latter being used for swimming. They are also extinct, but the monitor lizards are the closest living relatives. Both of these reptile groups were dominantly fish eaters.

Timpendean Rocks

The limestone shelter at Timpendean in the Weka Pass, containing prehistoric rock drawings, is one of the largest and best known in New Zealand. It was first studied by professor Julius von Haast, director of Canterbury museum, in the 1870’s, and over the last century has received quite a lot of attention from archaeologists and prehistorians.
Like other similar rock drawings, many hundreds of which can be found throughout the South Island, the moa hunter Maoris did these. These early New Zealanders came into the area to gather food, principally bush birds (including Moa's), which were still found there at this time because the region was still forested.
Limestone overhangs such as this one made convenient shelters for these hunters in which they could sleep and cook. After the forest was burnt off about 500 years ago, the Maori people ceased to utilize rock shelters and, as a consequence, rock drawing ceased also.
The drawings in the Timpendean shelter were all executed originally with charcoal or red ochre (kokowai), both of them used dry rather than as a paint. Charcoal would have been readily available from cooking fires, but the ochre, which does not occur naturally in the area, must have specially been brought in. Unfortunately, the main figures in the Timpendean shelter have been overpainted by Europeans using red and black house paint. Although a mass of un-retouched charcoal drawings can be seen on the wall behind these.
Identifiable subjects in the drawings at Timpendean include human figures, fish and dogs. Others appear to be purely imaginary designs, while some seem to be merely formless scribbles.
Haast made an archaeological investigation of the deposits in the shelter floor last century, and a hundred years later Canterbury museum carried out similar work. These excavations revealed the remains of many different bush birds, Moas, rats and freshwater mussel shell which could have been gathered in the area, as well as marine shells, seal and dog bone, brought in from the coast by the cave artists. Burnt stones and charcoal from the cooking fires were plentiful as well as fragments of stone tools made from both local and imported materials.

Notes on the Climate

Seasons vary dramatically:
Summers can be searing with temperatures in the high thirties (Celcius). The NOR'WEST ARCH is spectacular, and high winds something to be experienced.
Snow is common in the winter, with Autumn featuring mild temperatures and stunning seasonal colours.
Exotic flowers, lush green pastures and lambs in abundance dominate the Spring landscape.

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