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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 4 (August 1, 1928)

[section]

Ancient volcanic cones that seem to form a line of sentries along this Aukati line, the old frontier, are a conspicuous landscape feature of the King Country border. Between the Maungatautari Range on the east and Pirongia's forested peak, 3,444 feet high, on the west, there is a series of cones and ranges of obvious volcanic origin, now clothed in fern and bush. The railway line runs between two of these heights a few miles south of the Puniu. On the left hand (east) is the gracefully moulded Kawa Hill; on the right rises Kakepuku Mountain, 1,400 ft. high, a long extinct volcano. Just after passing between these romantically shaped mountains the rails cross the reclaimed farm lands that once were great marshes, the Kawa Swamp, a famous place among the older Maori for tuna, or eels, and wild duck.

Kakepuku is a typical volcanic cone, of bold simplicity of outline, sweeping steeply down in classic lines of rest from a saucer-like crater summit. Its isolation from other heights gives it a character and dignity of its own, and it is not strange that the ancient Maori endowed it with godlike attributes and built poetic legends about it. Its sides are deeply scored with ravines, and remnants of the forests fill its higher gullies. Its neighbour, Kawa, is a wonderful little mountain, presenting on the side facing our railway and the rich pasture levels of the reclaimed swamp, a deep, ferny hollow, the ancient crater, and on the other flank, the eastern, a symmetrical-rounded breast carved by the ancient fort-builders in scarp after scarp of defensive works.