10 minutes from the hotel
The Spray Tunnel
The Spray Tunnel is a narrow, hand-cut tunnel just outside town, driven through rock in the late 1800s to carry a tramway to the Spray mine. You can walk straight through it.
- From the hotel10 minutes
- Best forAn hour
Photograph: Kim Dunstan
It is small, dark and low, and it is exactly as it was left. The pick marks are still in the walls. Whatever you have imagined about the scale of West Coast mining, the tunnel corrects it downward and makes it far more human.
It is 10 minutes from the hotel, which makes it the easiest thing on this entire guide to actually do. If you arrive late in the afternoon with nothing planned, this is the one.
The parkrun course runs through part of the same track network on Saturday mornings, which tells you how central it is to the way the town uses this country now.
Practical
Worth knowing
- Take a torch. The tunnel is genuinely dark in the middle.
- The floor is uneven and often wet.
- It is short. This is a half hour stop, not an expedition.
- The surrounding tracks are worth a wander if you have longer.
Stay the night at the Heemskirk
Ten minutes from your room, which makes it the easiest thing to do on the whole coast.