This tramp was to be to the Mt William Walkway in the Bombay hills, but as it was the lambing season the walkway was closed, so leader Barbara changed it to the Cascade Walkway in Howick not far from her home and running past her workplace. We set out from the main entrance to Howick Historical Village, where the walkway starts, soon after 2pm. This followed up the Pakuranga Stream through a grassed reserve to soon cross a cul-de-sac and enter a lovely little reserve of tall pines overlooking a small waterfall cascading into quite a large pond - hence the name of the walkway. A viewing platform had been constructed to allow people to get a good view of the falls and pond below.

Beyond this we crossed the Hattaway Bridge which had been built a few years ago in memory of Captain Robert Hattaway who was a pioneer settler of the 19th century. The bridge marked the site of a scoria-paved road that was there in Captain Hattaway’s day. The track then passed through a large culvert (effectively a wide tunnel carrying the stream and track) underneath Aviemore Drive before following once more through grassed reserve following the stream. Further upstream Barbara told us how the stream can rise rapidly in heavy rain. As a teacher at the adjacent Cascade Christian College she described how she could look out her classroom window on wet days and see the stream in flood several metres higher than normal, and told of instances where school staff had to go out and rescue not errant children but adults passing by - one instance was when a woman tried to rescue her dog that had got caught in the floodwaters and ended up the same way, and the work of Barbara’s colleagues saved the lives of both her and her dog! We carried on up the walkway following the stream to eventually come to Meadowlands near the shopping centre, and the Whitford Road bridge that had three tunnels - the middle one for the stream and the two side tunnels were for pedestrians. That was as far as we went (the walkway finishes about 10min further on at Meadowlands Drive) because we had arranged to be back at the Howick Historical Village cafe before it closed at 4pm. So we returned the way we came and managed to get back to the start soon after 3:45pm to relax in the cafe over coffee and cake. Unfortunately we did not have time to explore the historical village itself (where the Feyen family trained for a week before moving into a restored old house in Grey Lynn to live for 10 weeks in 1900-style for the TV series Pioneer House) but the cafe itself with its old photos of Howick on the wall gave a bit of a historical atmosphere.