The Ship at Anchor – Lammermoor Range
The Ship at Anchor – Lammermoor Range, Te Papanui Conservation Park
Saturday, 25 April 2026
This was on the club calendar as part of a weekend visit to Dunedin, but only Jenny was able to make the trip south for the ANZAC Day long weekend. However, we continued with the intention of doing a walk within the Te Papanui Conservation Park, to the aptly named “The Ship at Anchor”, a large rock tor surrounded by a couple of small tarns on the eastern crest of the Lammermoor Range, west-northwest of Dunedin.
We’d arranged to meet in the Moana Pool carpark, where Jenny arrived from Oamaru shortly after 8:00 a.m., greeted by her sister Beth, a Dunedin resident, along with club members Dave Woods from Otago Peninsula, and Rodney & Helen Meiklejohn, also Dunedin residents.
We headed out of Dunedin via Three Mile Hill and made our way out to Outram before continuing along State Highway 87 (Lee Stream – Outram Road) to Lee Stream, where we turned onto Black Rock Road, which continues onto Lee Flat Road to connect with Mahinerangi Road, a short distance from the turn-off onto Eldorado Track, leading up through the Mahinerangi Wind Farm to a locked gate at the entrance of the Department of Conservation easement to the Te Papanui Conservation Park. Here we parked our vehicles and at 9:24 a.m. headed off along the Deep Stream weir access road with a strong westerly wind already blowing. An hour later, having covered four kilometres, we’d reached the high point of the access road at 875 metres, before dropping down to the end of the road at the Deep Stream weir, Dunedin’s primary water supply. We stopped for a morning tea break before crossing the pipeline footbridge over Deep Stream to the start of the cross-country route out of the Deep Stream gorge. Initially, we followed a series of blue tapes tied to low branches marking the route out of the gorge, before sidling around to the north and dropping straight down to cross a tributary of Deep Stream. Once across and up the bank on the other side, a steady climb brought us up to the edge of the vast tussock slopes leading up to The Ship at Anchor. Rodney had been in here just two days earlier to scope out a less tussock dense route (hip-to-chest-deep in places), so we traversed across and up the slopes to the northeast to reach an old vehicle track at 915 metres, leaving a relatively easy ascent route of just 15 minutes straight up to The Ship at Anchor, ‘moored’ at 990 metres on the eastern edge of the Lammermoor Range. After a lap of The Ship at Anchor, we climbed up onto the southeastern edge of the rock to shelter from the wind, although Jenny, Dave and Helen scrambled up onto the top of the rock, struggling to remain upright to pose for a photo.
With extensive views to the Rock and Pillar Range and Kakanui Mountains to the northeast, the Silver Peaks and other coastal hills of the Dunedin area to the east, and the Mahinerangi Wind Farm and Lake Mahinerangi to the southeast, we enjoyed our scenic lunch break before setting off for the descent route shortly after 1:00 p.m. Initially sidling north around the head of another Deep Stream tributary gully, we descended east-southeast down to Deep Stream at the location of a 19th century goldmining site. The descent down reasonably shallow tussock slopes, sheltered from the westerly wind, took a little over an hour to complete, after which Deep Stream was crossed without too much difficulty. We had a quick inspection of the remaining stone walls and structures of the old goldmining site, before carrying on south along a 4WD track, leading back to a junction with the Deep Stream weir access road, which had us back at the vehicles by 4:00 p.m., completing a 14-kilometre circuit in just over 6½ hours. We drove back through the Mahinerangi Wind Farm to Outram for ice creams and refreshments before parting company.
Unfortunately, the early arrival of rain around Dunedin on Sunday morning put an end to our plan to walk a series of tracks over and around Harbour Cone on Otago Peninsula.
Many thanks to Jenny for making the drive down from Oamaru to join her sister Beth, Dave, Rodney & Helen on an enjoyable wander in a wilderness environment a bit different from the usual locations.
Rodney Meiklejohn.