Heathcote Valley

I have now finished walking Heathcote Valley apart from the Summit Road. The library has the Summit Road as part of Heathcote Valley. The area was named after Sir William Heathcote who was a member of the Canterbury Association. There was an article in Papers Past for 1848 with a list of the members and it certainly explains street and place names in Canterbury. I will complain that they spelt Lord Lyttelton’s name wrong. The secretary of the Association was a H M Lefroy and I wish that I had known that when I was looking after Charlotte. I could have had great fun winding her up as she was so scathing and nasty about the colonies. Sir William Heathcote was born in 1801 and died in 1881. I don’t believe that he ever came out to New Zealand but a Alfred S Heathcote came out to New Zealand in 1851. He was possibly a nephew of Sir William Heathcote but I haven’t double checked on the Ancestry website. Edited to say that it is unlikely that Alfred Spencer Heathcote was related to Sir William Heathcote.

There were sections being sold in Heathcote as early as 1851. By 1855 the parish of Heathcote was being mentioned in Papers Past. Heathcote was a busy place between goods and people coming over the Bridle Path and goods coming by sea from Lyttelton to the Heathcote Wharf. The Heathcote Ferry gets a lots of mentions on Papers Past. Once the railway tunnel was built between Lyttelton and Heathcote there was no longer a need for transporting goods by sea from Lyttelton. One of my Cornish ancestors worked on the railway tunnel and he was recruited by the Melbourne company that was building it.