‘PLACED BY AN ENCHANTER’S WAND’
Sep 09, 2018
4 minutes
Words Sheryl Bainbridge
Photos Neill Bainbridge
While returning to England from a trip to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, naturalist Charles Darwin – who had broken his journey at Paihia in the Bay of Islands – was invited to visit the Waimate North mission station by missionary William Williams. The property’s English-style rural landscape, laid out in the nature of a model farming village with fields of wheat and corn, fruit trees and vegetables, led Darwin to enthuse that it had been “placed there as if by an enchanter’s wand”.
This is just one of the fascinating tales that Heritage New Zealand
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