A nice sunny afternoon drew almost fifty people to explore one of Auckland’s extinct volcanic cones and one of Auckland’s newest parks. We started our walk at the corner of Duke St and Mt Eden Rd, and headed up the Three Kings hill - via the pathways except David Kilgour and Matthew, who went straight up the pipeline. We were rewarded with a panoramic view from the top, including Mt Eden, Sky Tower, Mt Albert, Mt Roskill, Manukau Heads, Mt Roskill, One Tree Hill, Rangitoto and, in the distance, Moehau at the end of the Coromandel Peninsula.

From there we continued along a track skirting the edge of Winstones Quarry - or what is left of two of the big hills that originally made up Three Kings, all in the name of roading construction - and then across Three Kings Park past the Plunket rooms and the former Mt Roskill Borough Council building (now the Metrowater offices). The park itself is used as a sports field, and every December hosts a well-attended Carols by Candlelight service complete with Christmas pageant. A small amount of roadbashing brought us into the grounds of the St Francis Friary in Hillsborough Rd. We had been given permission to cross the grounds of this home of the Franciscan Friars (a Catholic religious order) to enter the new Hillsborough Premier Park, barely a year old. About this time in 1999 the Auckland City Council completed the purchase from the Catholic church of a large area of open parkland as the first part of a new “premier park” that will eventually be developed to become a park of the same standing as the Auckland Domain and Cornwall Park. When we visited this park, no obvious development had yet been done apart from lawn mowing and other maintenance.

As we entered the park we began to drop down into a broad amphitheatre, with a view looking across to Royal Oak and One Tree Hill. We had our afternoon tea by a disused and dilapidated building, believed to have been used for training Catholic students back in the 1960s/70s and possibly since as a barn. No doubt this will disappear before too long as the park gets developed. Some of us had a look at what looked like bunkers set into the ground with just the roofs showing, but these turned out to be what could have been fancy facades that had been saved when a fancy old building had been demolished.

From there we carried on through the park and out to Mt Albert Rd for a quick walk through back streets to come out onto Mt Eden and back to our starting point - we finished just after 4pm.