Harry Ell and the Summit Road

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 936, 19 July 1957, Page 17

Harry Ell and the Summit Road

, a V ISITORS, to Christchurch who drive or, better, walk along the Summit Road which runs atound the top of the Port Hills are likely nowadays to take its sealed sufface and magnificent views of harbour, plains and mountains for granted, The truth is that it’s not just another scenic rodd which was bulldozed overnight and sealed next day when the public purse was overflowing. More than anything else it’s a memorial to one man, Harry Ell, who 95 years ago was born in Halswell, just beneath the Port Hills, and around the turn of the century was to take one day a walk to Kennedy's Bush by way of Dyets Pass and a barely noticeable track along the summits. Ell, says Lenore Oakley in a sefies of talks about him now being heard from 3YA on Tuesday nights, was "struck by the beauty of the views disclosed at every turn ... returned that way again and again, and from these repeated walks the conception of a Summit Road sprang to life in his mind." At one time a soldier in the campaign against Te Whiti in Taranaki, later a Member of Parliament and a militant Prohibitionist, Harry Ell gave about half his life to the Summit Read. The road itself was not the whole of his team, however--he wanted to see also a chain of roadhouses along it. Of the 12 he planned four were in use before he died. Today the best known of them, The Sign of the Takahe, stands about half-way up to Dyers Pass, a monument to Harry Ell’s almost in- —

credible labours with his « own 1 hands and a devoted team of helpets. The Sign of the Kiwi, once neglected, has been restored, and the Sign of the Packhorse is still used by trampers; but the Sign of the Bellbird is in ruins. The Summit Road was still unfinished when Ell died in 1934, and it was after his death that the Main Highways Board was persuaced to complete and maintain the highway as it is today. | acini