The best of all was my walks was one to Sandymount and Lovers Leap. Admiral butterflies are common here, and sure enough, plenty of nettles, the caterpillars’ favoured food plant, were to be seen—and given a wide berth—in the surrounding scrub. The summit of Sandymount gives broad views, but Lovers Leap is much more impressive. There is no hint of verticality in the flat tussocky path that leads to an undistinguished enclosure—the sort of wire-mesh-and-wood concoction a farmer might use to carry a ram on the back of a pick-up—apparently sitting in midfield. Only once you stepped in did the chasm become apparent. It is as though the axeman of Maori myth who carved out Fiordland had taken a practice whack at the east coast. Stone cliffs arc downward to a narrow finger of sea washing far below on a tiny unreachable boulder beach. Across the seaward entrance to the chasm, a third of the way up the cliffs, lies a natural bridge. The whole thing has a remarkable symmetry to it.