The Tale of Horohoro.

In last month's “Railways Magazine” I discussed some place names. One I shall take for a topic just now is Horohoro. That flat-topped mountain range, lifting like a huge violet table from the plains, is a wonderful landscape feature when you come on it round a bend in the Rotorua-Atiamuri road. There was a little isolated Maori kainga at its foot, on the gently sloping talus of good volcanic soil. Now there is a well-cultivated native farming area with modern homes about the base of the ancient mountain. It is a fascinating skyline, that table with a vertical uplift of more than a thousand feet (its summit between 2400 and 2500 feet above sea-level), its tremendous eastern face of rocky wall, broken into innumerable chines. Horohoro I have seen translated as “fallen, fallen,” in supposed allusion to the geological cataclysm of old which left this Maori “mesa” standing there sharp-cut against the sky. Also, “horohoro” might refer to landslips, or falls of rock from the cliffs. But the root word “horo” means something quite different.

A wise man of the Arawa once discoursed to me on some of these names and their origins. The full name of the mountain (it is really the butt-end of the range which extends from the Hautere-Mamaku plateau) was given by this authority on local history as “Te Horohoronga-nui-a-Tia,” which means “The Great Swallowing of Tia.” This ancestor Tia lived six centuries ago; he was one of the chiefs who landed at Maketu from the Polynesian immigrant canoe Arawa.