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From Heritage New Zealand Winter 2007Peak practiceby Sonja MatlaThe unique and perilous Denniston Incline was described as eighth wander of the world, but was also a one way trip for some
A small West Coast coal town once famous for its coal Denniston’s fame spread further when Wellington writer Jenny Pattrick based her historical novel Denniston Rose in the township. Its success led to film rights to the story being sold. The film is in development with the New Zealand Film Commission.Central and regional funding has poured into the Buller region recently in an effort to open up new areas for tourism and relieve crowding at popular attractions.
Denniston will get a slice of that money, which may result in a full-time historian and a Department of Conservation concession to run guided tours in the old mines.At one time, Denniston was New Zealand’s most productive coal mine. The deep rich coal seam was discovered in 1860 by Julius Haast while making a topographical survey of the Buller district. He spent two days following a small stream after finding pieces of coal in the water, and discovered the 2.5 metre thick coal seam under a waterfall. He named the cliff Burnett’s Face, after James Burnett, an engineer who accompanied him, and the valley Coalbrookdale, after a coal-mining village in Shropshire, England.
Burnett surveyed the find and estimated there were 72 million tonnes of coal in the valley alone. He also suggested an incline railway system, run by gravity, to bring the coal down onto the coastal plain below, with the descending full trucks bringing the empties back up. It was more than a decade before coal was actually mined in the area. The township itself was named after visionary Robert Blair Denniston, who was officially a “coal viewer” but could see the area’s potential. In 1873, he was employed to carry out topographical and mineral surveys, and he was also able to market the plateau to financiers in Dunedin. In 1878, the Westport Colliery Company was formed by William Larnach, of Dunedin’s Larnach Castle fame.
Work began on the incline in 1879, and the first coal travelled on it a year later. The incline made Denniston unique among New Zealand coal towns and was described by proud locals as “The Eighth Wonder of the World”. The incline was two kilometres long and in two parts, the upper controlled by huge hydraulic brakes at the aptly named Brakehead, and the lower part controlled from Middle Brake. This allowed two wagons to go up or down at the same time. The incline rose 510 metres, resulting in a gradient at the upper end of 1 in 1.34. It delivered coal from Denniston to the Conns Creek yards, where the coal was then railed to Westport. Coal continued down the incline for a further 87 years until a vehicle road was built.
Denniston is 600 metres high, as elevated as many mountain passes in the South Island. While its height affords a magnificent view, it gets two and a half metres of famous West Coast rain each year and a vicious wind. Eight centimetres of snow were recorded last year.In the early days, miners, mostly single men, were housed in tents perched on the cliff-top. It was dubbed “The Camp”, a name that stuck through Denniston’s history. Hostels and rough bachelorhuts were built but, when families arrived, the men often moved back into tents where children were raised in more private but primitive conditions as houses were erected. By 1882, the burgeoning town had just a handful of houses, draughty unlined huts and tents and no running water, sanitation or roads.
Before the bridle path was formed in 1884, the only way up or down the plateau was by riding the coal wagons. The empty wagons heading up the incline threw their passengers and belongings around inside, particularly during the steepest part. To descend, passengers had to lie flat on top of the coal and hold onto the edge. Many women and children were so traumatised by the journey up that they refused to go down again. Maria Milligan, who raised four of their seven children in a tent, didn’t leave Denniston for 14 years. Once the bridle path was built, it was actually illegal to travel on the wagons, but the narrow, steep path was not considered much of an improvement. The only time passengers could legally ride the wagons was when they were taken to Waimangaroa cemetery to be buried. Some women whose children died didn’t attend their funeral or visit their grave for many years. Ten years after the incline was built, Denniston had grown rapidly and boasted a high school of 190 children, shops, hotels, a brass band, cricket club and bowling green.
Other villages had sprung up, too. Burnetts Face and the smaller Coalbrookvale and Marshallvale were quite separate towns with their own amenities, although Denniston always had the edge with the only police and fire station and four churches. The hospital, tennis courts and swimming pool were more centrally located and both Denniston and Burnetts Face had post offices, primary schools and libraries. The combined population peaked at 1500 in 1911, and Denniston continued to grow over the next 15 years while the Burnetts Face area declined.In the early 1950s, 500 people still lived in Denniston, but the 1951 waterfront strike had severely affected the miners, who went out in solidarity. The fall-out from the strike, combined with the reducing demand for coal, saw many leave the hill. In the early 1960s, empty houses started being sold and moved to the coast as holiday homes. There are now only six houses left and nine permanent residents. Friends of the Hill chairperson Gary James came to Denniston in 1987 with his wife, Sylvia, and three children. Sylvia had previously lived in Denniston, where for five years she raised the two older children. The couple’s fourth child was born while at Denniston.
As a child, Gary was captivated by his grandmother’s stories of her travelling shoe-salesman father. As he listened to the tales of his travels throughout the West Coast, he was caught up in the romance of towns such as Denniston and Charleston, another local coal town. At nine years old, he decided he was going to live in one of the two towns as an adult, even though he had been to neither. Gary says Denniston is not as isolated as people assume, as a wide, sealed road joins the town with civilisation. It’s a 15-minute drive to the nearest shop at the bottom of the hill and Sylvia drives 30 minutes to work in Westport every day. “The only time it did get difficult was when the kids were teenagers,” Gary says. The family bought a house in Birchfield, a tiny village on the flat between Westport and Granity. But they only lasted eight months before the pull of Denniston got to them. Gary tries to explain his love of Denniston. “Denniston is something special; I think it’s the altitude,” he says, “There’s nowhere else like it in the country. Other towns, like Otira, are as high but it’s in a valley.”
This mysterious attraction of Denniston has long exerted its influence. In 1926, Fred Todd, just arrived from England, brought his bride, Maire, to Denniston to start a new job in the mines instead of a honeymoon. She cried the whole way up the hill. Forty years later, they retired and left Denniston for easier living on the flat. Maire cried all the way down. Today, Gary is not alone in his passion for the plateau. The trust members number 270 and live throughout New Zealand and overseas. Some were born here, others married miners or worked in the mines.” It’s like a badge of honour that their families came from here,” Gary says, “They just want to be part of it.” The trust was formed in 1993 after Gary attended a gathering of 550 Denniston enthusiasts in Christchurch. The group kept meeting up at funerals so decided to meet in happier circumstances. Those two-yearly gatherings have continued and Gary says, to make it worthwhile for those who live further away, it is now a three-day event. It’s also one of the trust’s major fundraisers, as door charges and raffles boost the annual $15 membership fee. The trust has turned Denniston from a ghost town into an informative historical site. The high school was one of the better-preserved buildings, so the trust paid Solid Energy a peppercorn rental and restored it in the early 1990s. It is now the trust’s museum and information centre. In a barn next door is a restored shift bus, which took the miners up and down the hill in the early 1970s, and a re-creation of a mine 100 years ago, complete with coal wagon and horse.
The horses used in the Denniston mines were part Shire, and much larger than the Welsh cobs used overseas. This was possible because the mine had high ceilings as the coal seam was deep and easy to mine. Individual horses could haul seven tonnes of coal. They were stabled underground and only came to the surface a couple of times a year. However, they were well fed and looked after by dedicated workers. Another area of interest is the Brakehead at the top of the incline. It is dominated by the remains of the huge wheels used to control the wagons on the incline. There are also concrete foundations, walls and chimneys and part of a tower used for the aerial cableway in the 1950s. There are a number of interpretative displays, and a short walk takes visitors to a viewpoint overlooking the steepest part of the incline. Gary says the trust plans to re-install the rails at the top of the incline and put a static wagon on the rails to give an idea of what the journey would have been like in the early days. Three walks around the plateau have been established by the trust. The 20-minute walk from the Brakehead to Banbury Arch shows the stone arch that gave access to the first mine’s entrance. Rails and a coal truck will also be returned to this area. A one-hour Coalbrookdale walk from Burnetts Face takes in sections of the rope road, which originally brought the coal from the mines to the incline. The path passes a number of mine entrances, relics and stone walls and ends at a brick fan house. A two-hour walk downhill from Denniston follows the original bridle path, finishing at Conns Creek Road. At the end of the road are the Conns Creek yards, where the lower section of the incline can be seen. Coal is still being mined at Denniston. While the Government decided to concentrate solely on the Stockton mine in the 1990s, a private mine that opened in the 1920s is still operating and plans are underway for another private mine to open up. For most Friends of the Hill, however, it is the history of the place that draws them back to Denniston. Helping
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