Collingwood Cemetery

Name
Collingwood Cemetery
Location
Collingwood
Co-ordinates
1573009  5496050
Alternative co-ordinates
1572989  5496247
Configuration
Loop
Distance
1 km
Status
On-leash
Grade
Easy
Access
On SH60, take Excellent about 400 metres south of the Collingwood junction, then turn left onto Orion Street. Entrance to walk either beside cemetery or 200 metres further on through narrow gap in bush. Alternatively, follow Gibbs Road up from the town (on foot) and continue onto Orion Street.
Description
Length doesn't always matter! This walk is short but very worthwhile. The total loop is only about 1 km, but the cemetery is an experience not to be missed, with its poignant plaques to all the early settlers who died - far too may of them by drowning. The site also overlooks what was once planned as the future capital of New Zealand . . .
Connecting tracks
Collingwood Beach
Further Information


​This is a short walk, and much of it is on the road, so it's not the sort of walk I would normally include here. But this one has special interest because it leads to an old cemetery, in which lie the remains of many of the early European settlers of the Collingwood area. And the whole cemetery has been mapped out and the people who lie there listed, with their cause of death, on a plaque amidst the graves. It's a poignant experience to stand there and read the plaque. The people who died young, probably one in every ten of them by drowning - the Kiwi death. The few who survived to an old age won, you imagine, by perseverence against all the odds. 

The cemetery shows, also, the dream of what Collingwood might have been. Stimulated by the discovery of gold nearby, in 1857, Gibbstown - as it was originally named - was seen as the potential site for the future capital city of New Zealand. In the cemetery there's a map, showing how the town was to be laid out on the terraces below, the streets ready-named. In reality, it never came about. Instead the settlers chose to live on the flat land around the river mouth. So Gibbstown remainedc a dream, and Collingwood became the town it is. Small and functional and unassuming. 

You can see the cemetery simply by driving up Excellent Street then onto Orion Street, and parking on the verge. But the community have carved a walkway through the coastal scrub on the hillside behind, so a more wirthwhile way of seeing it is to start in Collingwood and follow Gibbs Road up the hillside to where the sealed road ends, then take the narrow track on the left which loops around to the cemetery. It's a ten minute walk at most, but you can easily spend twice as long again amongst the gravestones, reflectiong on life and death as it was then, and the dreams people had.
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