Mount Sunday

In the upper valley of the Rangitata River, a lone rocky knoll rises from a broad, braided floodplain ringed by snow-streaked ranges. Mount Sunday is only a modest hill, its summit at about 611 metres, but few places in New Zealand capture the scale of the South Island high country so completely. From the top the view takes in the shingle channels of the Rangitata, Mount Potts to the north and the jagged Two Thumb Range across the river, with nothing man-made in sight. Its name comes from the shepherds of the two neighbouring sheep stations, who are said to have ridden the boundaries and met here on Sundays.

The hill is a roche moutonnée, a landform shaped by ice. During the Pleistocene the Rangitata Glacier repeatedly flowed down this valley, grinding smooth the upstream side of the rock and plucking away the downstream side, which is why Mount Sunday is gentle on one flank and steep and craggy on its south-eastern face. The glaciers had pulled back into the headwaters of the Clyde and Havelock rivers by about 15,000 years ago, leaving the knoll stranded in the middle of the valley. This landscape also inspired literature long before film: the English writer Samuel Butler farmed sheep at nearby Mesopotamia Station in the early 1860s and used the country as the setting for his satirical novel Erewhon, published in 1872.

Its modern fame comes from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. Location scouts flying over the valley picked the hill as Edoras, the hilltop capital of Rohan, and the crew spent months building a road, houses, stables and the Golden Hall of King Théoden on the summit. After filming in 1999 the whole set was dismantled and the land returned to its natural state, so nothing of Edoras remains. Yet even without it, visitors who recognise the silhouette from The Two Towers find the scene instantly familiar, and the hill lies within Hakatere Conservation Park, where a short track climbs to the top.

Getting there

Mount Sunday is in the Ashburton District of inland Canterbury; the town of Ashburton is about 78 km away in a straight line. The usual approach is by road from Mount Somers along Ashburton Gorge Road and Hakatere Potts Road, the last stretch on gravel, roughly two hours' drive from Christchurch. Timaru Airport (TIU) is about 88 km away, while Christchurch Airport (CHC) is the main gateway for the region.