St. Bathans

Drive through the Pig Root, and then the Maniototo, and just when you think you're as far away from anywhere as you can possibly be, take the side road to the right, drive about 10 minutes and you'll arrive at St Bathans. It's a place where, a hundred and fifty years ago, people went a little crazy looking for gold. They built a little town with a hotel and a bank and a church on the hill made from (yes, really) corrugated iron. They dammed the stream and used the mounded up water to sluice away the ground, making untidy piles of debris and carving a great wound in the Earth. The gold is long gone but the town remains and people still visit to get a share of quaintness and to eat a meal in the hotel and maybe encounter the ghost which lurks in one of its bedrooms. Some pray in the church, which, against the odds, is still there, as good as new. But most come to look at the wound, now aged and filled with water. The Blue Lake.

The scar has become ethereally beautiful. It is jagged and raw and strangely restful all at once. Some of our wounds are too big to be denied or hidden or repaired. They just are. But leave them long enough and they can become eerily sacred: a blessing to us and to those who come later. We Christians call this redemption.

Photo: Nikon D7100, Nikkor 18-200 @50mm. 1/250 f8, iso100. Post processing with Corel PSP. The Blue Lake has been photographed so many times its hard to avoid cliche. I Straightened and cropped this shot to remove a distracting pale element in the top left corner, to make the edge of the lake and the hills run corner to corner and to let the pale areas in the water balance the white of the hills. I was hoping to catch the stillness and quiet orderliness of the place but also its jagged, jumbled, chaotic genesis .

Comments

Alden Smith said…

Stunning photos. The snow in the bottom photos looks deep, did you use a 4WD with chains?

When Christine and I last traveled this road we turned off to the right twice to Naseby and St Bathans then once on the left to Opir. Each has its own ambience. I liked Naseby a lot with its village green and old houses. It had a nice feel to it.

9 November 2018 at 10:25

Kelvin Wright said…

I used to drive up to St. Bathans sometimes on my day off, to take pictures. The two bottom ones were taken on a different day than the one at the top. I couldn't drive down to the Blue Lake, that day and walked through snow that was thigh deep. The road there and back was OK. I carried chains of course, but didn't have to use them

9 November 2018 at 10:56

Elaine Dent said…

The last paragraph was powerful...as is the photo. I'm grateful.

9 November 2018 at 13:31

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