Skip to content
Anomaly GraphCONNECT THE UNEXPLAINED
Start investigating
← Research library

Research source

And feet above little Rapaki village, lying in its grassy nest below--how that great spearhead of rock has in…

Date of account
Published 1923
Source
Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand
Reference
Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand · selected passage 13
Rights
public_domain
Language
English
Record updated
2026-08-25

View the original source ↗

Record summary

and feet above little Rapaki village, lying in its grassy nest below--how that great spearhead of rock has in reality an almost level top, we come to a remarkable broken wall of grey lava moss-crusted and shrub-tufted, protruding from the grassy flanks of the craggy knoll called Witch Hill

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

and feet above little Rapaki village, lying in its grassy nest below--how that great spearhead of rock has in reality an almost level top, we come to a remarkable broken wall of grey lava moss-crusted and shrub-tufted, protruding from the grassy flanks of the craggy knoll called Witch Hill. It is in fact a huge dyke of once-molten lava, cutting wall-like through the old lava flows and trending southward across the shoulder of its parent hill. From the very crest of the range it shoots in a palisade of frost-shattered rock, towering thirty feet and more in places above the stone-strewn tussocks, and it stretches some distance in irregular cyclopean steps down the steep slope towards Rapaki.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.

Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.