Please respect the local farmland and bush, no bush bashing or fence crossing is required, use the gates and paths, even if that means you have to walk a little further.
"Just East of the city, right off the motorway, is a hill and a park. The name…is a little complicated. Fair warning, I’m going to start out this post with some boring geography nerd stuff that you can skip if you just want to see the pretty pictures :)
Naming things in New Zealand is a bit tricky. Many places and geographical features have Maori names dating back hundreds of years. Often, these places will have been given completely separate names by European settlers which also date back hundreds of years. As New Zealand embraces both its Maori culture and heritage and also its European culture and heritage, official place names are decided in conjunction between the New Zealand surveyors and gazetteers and the local iwi (Maori tribal governing bodies). As a result, many features and locations have official names both in Te Reo as well as in English (for example, the official name of One Tree Hill is Maungakiekie / One Tree Hill — maunga means mountain and kiekie is a native climbing vine).
Which brings us to Mutukaroa.
(I don’t actually know what Mutukaroa means. The scant research I did says that mutu is a type of snare set for a bird and karo or karoa is a verb meaning to evade or dodge, evoking the meaning of a bird escaping or evading a snare. Not sure if that’s the intended meaning, but I like it enough to provide it here in a parenthetical).
The hill itself is officially named Mutukaroa / Hamlin Hill and colloquially named Hamlins Hill (New Zealand, as I believe I’ve mentioned previously, has adopted the trend of dropping apostrophes from place names). Fair enough. But the hill exists within a park named by the Auckland Council, and they can’t seem to figure out what they’ve named it. The website calls it Hamlins Hill Mutukaroa, but as you can see above the sign calls it Mutukaroa Hamlins Hill Regional Park. Not ones for attention to detail, are the Auckland Council it seems.
"
https://nctonz.wordpress.com/2017/09/28/hamlins-hill-and-mutukaroa-regional-park/