34 Bathgate Street, Johnsonville-Ohariu, Wellington City
**A true colonial road
**Land transport was difficult and costly in early colonial New Zealand. People walked or, if lucky, took bullock carts along beaches or the sort of narrow Maori tracks found in the Ohariu Valley to the west of Wellington. The New Zealand Company had sold ‘country sections’ here in 1841 but few buyers rushed to take up their isolated purchases. The first ‘road’, steep and unformed for much of its length, followed an old Maori route. It offered little incentive to farm the steep, thickly forested slopes. Old Coach Road offered more. The name, a piece of early 20th-century romanticism, misleads because the road was really too narrow (4.2 metres) and steep for horse-drawn vehicles. Coaches almost certainly never ran along it. Despite opposition from settlers rated to pay for it, a strike and technical difficulties, migrant labourers carved out the road between late 1856 and September 1858. As you will see, they aligned it on as winding a route as possible to make it suitable for horses. Even so, most traffic would desert it eight years later when workmen completed a third road, the longer, wagon-friendly Ohariu Valley Road. The Johnsonville Town Board maintained Old Coach Road until the 1920s. It was never abandoned, like the first ‘road’ but, used by just the few farmers whose land it straddled, it largely escaped change. Late 20th-century suburban sprawl at the Johnsonville end swallowed up several sections but the remainder (which is still a legal road), forms a rare example of an almost unmodified early colonial road. The three-kilometre section between Johnsonville and Rifle Range Road in Ohariu Valley is now protected and it was the first road to be registered by the Historic Places Trust.
© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.
Further reading: Michael Kelly, ‘Old Coach Road’ in The Onslow Historian, Vol. 29, Nos 1 and 2.
The road is at the Johnsonville end of the Skyline Walkway.
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