Elephant Rocks, Limestone rock formation in Waitaki District, New Zealand.
Elephant Rocks is a group of weathered Otekaike Limestone boulders on a private sheep farm in the Maerewhenua Valley, 5 km south of Duntroon. The rounded, pockmarked rocks measure 1–10 metres across and lie scattered over about 200 metres on a gentle grassy hillside. They sit above the Oligocene Kokoamu Greensand and do not actually resemble elephants.
These limestone boulders formed about 25 million years ago when the area lay beneath a shallow sea. Ocean erosion gradually shaped and exposed these stones from their original bed.
The name comes from a circus elephant that died here in 1868 while being walked from Dunedin to Christchurch, after eating poisonous tutu berries. Its skeleton went to the Colonial Museum, and the spot became known as Elephant Hill, later Elephant Rocks. The rocks themselves are rounded and pockmarked but do not resemble elephants.
The rocks lie on a private sheep farm reached by a 5-minute walk across the paddock from a parking bay opposite the entrance on the Island Cliff-Duntroon Road, 5 km south of Duntroon. Sheep may be grazing, so close gates behind you. The Alps to Ocean Cycle Trail passes the site.
The rocks appear as Aslan's camp in the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The site is on private farmland, so the film crew worked among grazing sheep.
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