Kerikeri Mission Station

Two buildings sit together at the head of a tidal inlet, and between them they are the oldest surviving structures in the country. The Mission House, usually called Kemp House, is a plain Georgian timber house raised in the early 1820s for missionary families, and it has never been demolished, moved or rebuilt. The Stone Store next to it went up in the 1830s to hold mission supplies, a solid gable-ended block of local stone that has been a shop of one kind or another for most of its life since. Across the water the headland carries the earthworks of Kororipo Pa, a settlement of real importance in the same years. The setting is green, still and unexpectedly small.

History

The Kerikeri Mission was set up in 1819 by the Church Missionary Society under the protection of the chief Hongi Hika, and the Mission House was built in 1822 for the Reverend John Butler, with Māori sawing the native timber. James Kemp's family lived there from 1832 and kept it until 1974, when Ernest Kemp gave it to the Historic Places Trust; two Māori writing slates of the 1830s found in the house in 2000 are on the UNESCO New Zealand Memory of the World register (Wikipedia, Kemp House).

What you'll find

• Kemp House - the timber mission house of the early 1820s, the country's oldest surviving building.
• The Stone Store - the 1830s stone warehouse, still trading on its ground floor.
• Kororipo Pa - grassed terraces and ditches on the headland across the inlet.
• The mission garden - kitchen beds and old fruit trees running down to the water.

When to go

The basin is open year-round and the grounds can be walked at any time, but house tours run on set times and reduced hours outside summer, so check before making a special trip. Summer mornings are calm and the inlet is at its best on a high tide. Autumn brings fewer visitors and better light. The site is compact enough to fit around other Bay of Islands plans.

Things to know

It is a small site and, tours included, an hour and a half covers it. The interiors are modest by European standards, which is exactly the point but does disappoint some people. The Stone Store's ground floor operates as a shop, so the commercial atmosphere sits oddly with the building's age. Parking at the basin is tight in summer, and the low ground floods after heavy rain.

Nearby

The Rainbow Falls walk follows the river upstream, and Paihia and the Bay of Islands boats are twenty minutes away.

Key facts