Avonstour: The Treasure of Taranaki

There is a version of travel that is really just tourism with better photography. You arrive at a famous place, confirm that it looks as it did in the photographs, and leave with the sense that something is missing. 

Taranaki offers a different proposition. The region occupies the western bulge of New Zealand's North Island, roughly two hours south of Auckland by air and considerably longer if you've made the sort of optimistic assumptions about driving distances that most visitors make at least once. 

At its centre is a volcano called Taranaki Maunga; symmetrical, snow-capped on a good day, and so geometrically deliberate. The mountain is around 120,000 years old, last erupted in 1775, and is classified by volcanologists as dormant. It is simply one of the most striking landscapes in a country that has never struggled to produce them. 

Some travellers may pass through without stopping. The mountain, which has been watching people make this mistake for thousands of years, has probably grown accustomed to it by now.
 

The Valley Before The Farm

Driving into the Huiroa Valley is less an arrival than a gradual adjustment. The roads are narrow, as country roads are. Stone walls line the farms. Old wooden gates hang at the entrances with comfortable solidity. 

Livestock move across the hill paddocks, or don't move, in the unhurried way of animals. You cross flat agricultural land and then, suddenly, like crossing an invisible boundary, find yourself enveloped by native trees and dense bush that close in around the road as you climb toward the mountain. 

To the Māori people of Taranaki, this mountain is an ancestor. The story goes that Taranaki once lived among the great volcanoes of the central plateau:  Tongariro, Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, until he made romantic advances toward a female mountain named Pihanga, at which point Tongariro erupted with the kind of fury that tends to settle these disputes conclusively. 

Taranaki fled west, gouging the Whanganui River into the earth as he went, and has been standing alone near the coast ever since. It is, depending on your reading of it, either a cautionary tale about poor romantic judgment or a very good explanation for why the Whanganui River exists.
 

Three Things on the Mountain Worth Rearranging Your Plans For

Te Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki (Egmont National Park)

The national park wraps around the mountain in an almost perfect circle. The track network runs from a fifteen-minute stroll to a three-day circuit, and somewhere in between those extremes is something suitable for almost any level of optimism about one's own fitness. 

The Goblin Forest has the quality of a mystical fairy tale, a stretch of ancient kamahi trees draped in moss and ferns. On a clear day, the mountain is visible above the treeline. On a cloudy day, the forest itself is more than sufficient compensation.

Wilkies Pools

The Wilkies Pools are natural plunge pools formed by the scouring action of sand and gravel against lava that is 20,000 years old, reached via a 1.9km loop track beginning 100 metres above the Dawson Falls Visitor Centre. The water is crystal clear and cold year-round. The pools sit in a natural amphitheatre beneath the mountain, and on a clear day, the volcano frames the whole scene with majestic authority.

Dawson Falls

A short walk from the same carpark delivers you to Dawson Falls, where 18 metres of water drops into a narrow basalt gorge. This side of the mountain is considered low-effort, high-reward. It’s accessible enough for most visitors, spectacular enough to make them feel they've accomplished something worthwhile. The Dawson Falls Visitor Centre is the sensible place to begin, particularly if your plans were formed in better weather.
 

Avonstour Heritage Farm: The 16 Hectares That Contain Multitudes

Sixteen hectares in the Huiroa Valley doesn't sound like much until you understand what's on them. Avonstour Island Heritage Organic Farm keeps things alive that the rest of the world decided weren't worth the trouble.

John Earney runs his 16-hectare property in the Huiroa Valley, about an hour southeast of New Plymouth. He arrived in the valley originally as a herpetologist, in pursuit of a striped forest skink. It was the farmer's daughter who convinced him to stay, which suggests the skink was ultimately a secondary consideration.

John's work at Avonstour is straightforward to describe and harder to replicate: he keeps rare and heritage livestock breeds alive. His years collecting reptiles from New Zealand's offshore islands gave him an early lesson in how genetics works: specific, localised, and gone for good once they're gone. He hasn't forgotten it.

The farm shows this the moment you arrive. Horned black Pitt Island sheep graze at the entrance. Blue Swedish ducks, colourful roosters, and hissing geese line the driveway. White turkeys, Waipu goats, and rabbits in individual huts surround the farmhouse.

Up on the hill above the farmhouse live the Enderby cattle. This is a breed that came within a single cow of not existing anymore. That cow was named Lady (retrieved from a sub-Antarctic island in 1991 just ahead of a government cull), and from her, through patient breeding work and a reasonable amount of luck, three small herds now exist in New Zealand. John keeps one of them. The black bull will escort you around his paddock, narrating the experience in a low, unbroken bellow.

The farm also carries five pig breeds, three emus, rare donkeys, gypsy ponies, and alpacas. John has also created his own sheep breed, the Avonstour Island sheep, from a mob of animals that escaped onto a back valley on a previous property. 

The farm name comes from the Avon and Stour rivers near his childhood home in England, with 'Island' added for the self-contained way it all operates. The A-peaked wooden gates throughout the property (every one built by John, every one closing properly) stand for the farm name, for Mount Egmont to the west, and for a preference for doing things his own way from the beginning.
 

A Farm With a Philosophy and the Patience to Prove It

Avonstour runs on integration. Free-range poultry controls the grass and insects, fertilises the soil, cleans up after the pigs, and harrows the manure. Animals eat what the others leave. Weeds are consumed before they become a problem. The whole system functions as a series of relationships that took years to develop.

John is a qualified tutor who runs courses by request, covering beekeeping, horse breaking, harness-making, butchering, and the growing of unusual animals for the table, such as eels, game birds, and rabbits. 

The ethos of the farm is about sharing knowledge, food, and a working understanding of how a piece of land can function well when treated as a living system. No experience is required of visitors. Curiosity is the only prerequisite. 
 

Four Tiny Houses on a Farm 

Tiny Away manages four cabins on the Avonstour property, each named with a nod to the English rivers that gave the farm its identity. 

Henge Cabin by Tiny Away 

The Henge Cabin sits on Avonstour Island Heritage Farm in the Taranaki Heartland: a well-appointed tiny house that makes a persuasive case for something most people discover too late. A smaller space, done with care, is more comfortable than a larger one done without it. Egmont National Park is 52 minutes up the road, Paritutu Rock and Pukekura Park not much further, and the farm itself provides more than enough reason to stay put.

Stour Cabin by Tiny Away 

Also on the Avonstour property, the Stour Cabin features one private bedroom, a fully equipped kitchen, air conditioning, free WiFi, and on-site parking. What makes the Stour genuinely memorable is what surrounds it. This is an organic rare breeds farm where the hosts have arranged writing lessons and animal activities for younger guests. Educational tourism, in the best possible sense.

Stone Cabin by Tiny Away 

The Stone Cabin takes its character from the land it sits on. Grounded, tactile, and positioned to make full use of a farm that consistently offers more than first appearances suggest. It is the sort of place that makes the decision to stay an extra night feel less like an indulgence.

Avon Cabin by Tiny Away 

Named for the river threading through John's English past, the Avon Cabin rounds out four options on the same working farm: each one compact, considered, and placed on a property where rare breeds graze outside the window. 
 

A few nights at Avonstour tends to do something to your sense of proportion. You leave with a clearer sense of what a rare breed represents and why the people who preserve inconvenient things matter.

The mountain watches all of this. Somewhere on the road back, with the mountain still visible in the rearview mirror, you find yourself already thinking about when to return. This is, in the end, the most honest review a place can get.