Time: 60 minutes (actually 57 minutes)
Distance: 3.7 km
Start: Hughs Forest Park, 315 Horndon Street, Darfield
Finish: Same place - it's a loop
Date: Friday 16th October 2026
The forecast was terrible. A spring cold snap. How annoying. So anyway, we drove to Darfield via a disconcerting route that felt like we were always heading south when in fact we should have been heading west. Topics of conversation shifted from Marakesh and Casablanca to leverets that eat their own shit.
From Yaldhurst the heavens opened and the window wipers were going full tilt. Just past Darfield township on Horndon Street there was a small car park and a convenient loo. The rain also conveniently stopped and we entered the drippy forest on the blue walking track where fairy doors bedecked pine tree trunks. I like fairies and their bling. We tried opening the doors but they were mostly sealed shut.
We were walking in an anti-clockwise direction, and at some point we marched a few minutes off-piste to see the forest edge and the surrounding green paddocks with the Fonterra milk processing plant in the distance. That place reminds me of Cube (a 1997 horror film) and gives me the creeps. As we stood contemplating its megalithic proportions, the sun came out for the first time in days and we basked contentedly for a few minutes before heading back to the gloom under the pines.
Now the blue walking loop was running parallel to nearby busy State Highway 73, and cars and trucks were roaring by. This cacophony was dwarfed as the morning train thundered past somewhere close by but out of sight. I like trains. And actually I liked the walk too. The sun shone the through the drippy canopy and bathed us in dappled green light. We were armchair travelling through Sicily. You could almost image that the roaring cars were the ocean. Oh well, maybe not quite.
