Pentland Place

Pentland Place runs off Caledonia Place in Highlands Park. Named after the Pentland Hills in Scotland, the street was formed and named by 1979 which was the same year that Highlands Park began appearing on maps of New Plymouth. The original name of the development had been Tableland, meaning a raised area, reflecting the elevation of this part of town, but that was soon changed to Highlands Park. The switch allowed the majority of streets in the new suburb to be named after places in Scotland, a helpful theme and perhaps a refreshing change from the then-standard practice of simply naming them after streets in the original Devon city of Plymouth.

The Pentland Hills were formed under the sea 430 million years ago then thrust upward, shaped by a series of volcanic eruptions and an ice age. The hills run southwest from Edinburgh and although they were settled in Celtic times by the Votadini tribe, they were not properly mapped until the 1590s. The highest peak in the range is Scald Law at 579 metres, about a quarter of the height of Mount Taranaki.

Despite their modest dimensions, the Pentland Hills have inspired many well-known writers. They got a mention in Mary Shelley’s gothic classic Frankenstein and Edinburgh-born Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, wrote about the Pentland Hills in many of his poems, calling them the ‘hills of home’.

The area surrounding the Pentland Hills was designated a regional park in 1986. The park is home to nearly 1000 different species of plants and animals including badgers, voles, minks and otters. Birdwatchers have spotted more than 130 different types of birds in the hills, as well as 17 types of butterfly. An astonishing 143 varieties of moss have also been recorded.

There are eight other streets named Pentland across Aotearoa but the Australian state of Victoria has gone a step further, naming an entire town Pentland Hills.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.