Mt St John; Pastoral Idyll

Mt Eden from Mt St John (Sep 2012)

Tucked away between Market and Manukau Rds in the heart of Epsom is perhaps the most pleasantly suburban volcanic cone in existence. Surrounded by gracious villas and bungalows, not to mention a concentration of Auckland's private schools, you can often forget that Mt St John* is there and that it's actually public land. That's right, it doesn't belong to the gardens of houses along Ranfurly Rd or Mt St John Rd.

And it is quite lovely. In certain seasons, it even has a wee lake in the middle of the crater, with cows lowing in the pastures.

Back in September 2012, an enthusiastic wee girl in a Canada hoodie, dolly in hand, joined us in walking up the farmer's track from Market Rd. We had left the little one with grandparents - from his pushchair he was developing his now well-honed dislike of hill walking - and were enjoying being able to saunter up the easy 126m peak without negotiating cowpats and muddy grass with buggy wheels.

The amazing thing was despite being able to see this cone from my school tennis courts, having driven along Mt St John Rd more times than I've had hot dinners, and actually knowing a girl from school whose garden backed onto the hill, I had never been up to the summit and seen its pastoral views. We were utterly charmed.

There really were cows grazing by the pond.

Yet, like most of Auckland's maunga, the bucolic terracing of hillside and crater are signs of habitation much older than the surrounding early-twentieth-century suburb. Mt St John is Te Kōpuke and was a  pā. I do not know its strategic place in the network of villages and defences on the maunga of Tamaki Makau Rau, but you can still see the earthworks and kumara pits over which whare and other buildings would have been built.

Today, in the midday heat of a February Sunday, the grass was brown, the pond had dried up, and the cows were replaced by a handful of shorn sheep sheltering under the crater trees.

 It was hot though, and the boy child whinged muchly perched upon his father's shoulders, but the now somewhat older girl strode with gusto and the same enthusiasm of yore.

Mt St John is one of the little maunga, so it doesn't take long to get up and wander around the crater. Oh, it's a hill and I like hills. So here's to views to the Waitakere Ranges in the west and the Hunua Ranges to the east, the Waitemata Harbour and the Manukau Harbour, and all those mountains yet to (re)climb.

* I wish it was pronounced Mt "Sinjin", Jane Eyre-style, but it is prosaically Mount "Sint" John.