Lyttelton Bridle-Path

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 220, 17 September 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

Lyttelton Bridle-Path

WINDING up from the town of Lyttelton is a track over which has passed almost the whole cavalcade of Canterbury's history. At the foot it is now a road, so steep that motor vehicles have to travel in lowest gear, but a quarter the way up it becomes a grass-grown track half-way between a road and path.

By D. G. Dyne

Near the top it was until recently over-grown with broom and a few bushes of stinging nettle and is scored with small water-courses in winter. Over the hill it winds ilown into Heathcote Valley an d township near the mouth of the Lyttelton railway tunnel. When Godley reached Lyttelton in 1850 he set a gang of 60 pakehas and 40 Maoris to work. Early in 1851 the Bridle-Path was completed. Practically all the Canterbury Pilgrims climbed over

the hills by the path en route to their goods and chattels in this laborious future homes on the plains, men, women climb, probably doubly laborious after and children carrying their household I the enforced inactivity of shipboard.

There is record in the earliest copy of the "Lyttelton Times" of at least one immigrant dying of the strain of the climb. In 1852 an empty dray was drawn over the Bridle-Path by two horses, after which carts often made the trip, although none have done so for many years past. During the South African War the Canterbury contingent rode over it down into the port to ship for the distant battlefield. Half-way down the Heathcote side are remains of a stone monument erected to mark the way that Godley and his settlers passed to found their garden province. Close to the top of the BridiePath was a tower believed to have been used for purposes of sighting by the makers of the railway tunnel, but it was pulled down many years ago after a boy had been killed by a dislodged brick while birdnesting in it. Commanding as it does such a superb view it is no wonder that so many trampers cross the track. On the one side lie the waters of the harbour and the magnificent hills surrounding it and on the other the plains vanishing in the distance into the foot of the Alps, with the seaboard of tlje Canterbury coast sweeping away to north, an azure sky and sea ringed with a line of white surf from Sumner to the Kaikouras.