Mt Egmont / Mt Taranaki Farmland

Description

Mount Taranaki (Mt Egmont) is a dormant stratovolcano in the Taranaki region on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. At 2,518 metres, it is the second highest mountain in the North Island, after Mount Ruapehu. It is one of the most symmetrical volcanic cones in the world, and is New Zealand’s largest mainland volcanic cone by volume.

The name Taranaki is from the Māori language. The mountain was named after Rua Taranaki, the first ancestor of the iwi (tribe) called Taranaki, one of several iwi in the region. The Māori word tara means mountain peak, and naki may come from ngaki, meaning “clear of vegetation.” It was also named Pukehaupapa (“ice mountain”) and Pukeonaki (“hill of Naki”) by iwi who lived in the region in “ancient times”

Captain Cook named it Mount Egmont on 11 January 1770 after John Perceval, 2nd Earl of Egmont, a former First Lord of the Admiralty who had supported the concept of an oceanic search for Terra Australis Incognita. Cook described it as “of a prodigious height and its top cover’d with everlasting snow,” surrounded by a “flat country … which afforded a very good aspect, being clothed with wood and verdure”.