A Small Church, a Private Island, and a Harbour View
Greenhills is a small farming settlement on State Highway 1, roughly two-thirds of the way from Invercargill to Bluff, where the road meets the upper reaches of Bluff Harbour. Most people drive straight through, but a small white church stands out against the green hills on the eastern side of the highway, evoking the area's early European history. Nearby Colyer Island holds an archaeological story that connects this modest corner of Murihiku to the very beginning of human settlement in New Zealand. A short detour down Princes Road and Colyers Island Road traces the harbour edge and, at golden hour, this is one of the best calm evening views in Southland.
Greenhills Church
The Greenhills Church was completed in 1887 as an initiative of the scattered farming community that had established itself along the Invercargill to Bluff route. A small, white-painted timber building of the kind that once anchored rural communities throughout New Zealand, it is the oldest surviving timber church in Southland. It is also the starting point of the Bluff Heritage Trail, the 17-stop route running south through Bluff town to Stirling Point.
The View Along Colyers Island Road
Princes Road becomes Colyers Island Road as it swings east around the northern shore of Bluff Harbour. On a still evening during golden hour, the view south across the water is exceptional: Bluff Hill (Motupōhue) rises in the distance, its 265-metre cone clear against the sky, with the port infrastructure below it and Tiwai Point extending into the harbour to the right.
The harbour is sheltered here, and in the right conditions, the water holds a still, burnished quality that makes the whole scene, working port, volcanic hill, industrial peninsula, and open sky unexpectedly beautiful. No one else will be there, a perfect opportunity for a quiet evening picnic.
Polynesia's Southernmost Adze Quarry
The island at the end of the road is Colyers Island, a 15.6-hectare islet connected to the shore by a pedestrian causeway. It is privately owned and not open to the public. Originally known as Jones Island and then Cow Island, it was purchased by James Colyer in 1870. Colyer almost certainly did not know that the island's intertidal shores had been one of the most significant stone tool production sites in pre-European New Zealand.
The rock found here is a Bluff argillite, a fine-grained, tough stone that early Māori discovered could be worked into high-quality adze heads. From around 1300 to 1500 AD, seven stone-working sites operated around the island's shoreline. Adze blanks were shaped here, transported to Tiwai Point for finishing, and then distributed to communities as far as 500 km away.
Colyers Island was Polynesia's southernmost adze-manufacturing complex and one of only four known early tool-supply centres in New Zealand. The other known sites are Great Mercury Island, the Tahunga Quarry in Opito Bay on the Coromandel Peninsula, and D’Urville Island in the Marlborough Sounds.
The Railway Blockade
Greenhills has one further historical curiosity. When the Invercargill to Bluff railway was being built in 1866 and 1867, the route required large stone causeways to carry the line around the upper harbour foreshore near Greenhills. When the Southland Provincial Council ran out of money and could not pay the contractors, they responded by physically blocking the line at Greenhills and seizing all railway assets until the debt was resolved. The council had bankrupted the entire province through the cost of building this line, and Southland, as a political entity, was absorbed back into Otago in 1870 as a direct consequence. The line opened on 5 February 1867 and remains operational today as the southern tip of the KiwiRail network.
How to Get There
Greenhills is on State Highway 1, approximately 20 km south of central Invercargill and 7 km north of Bluff. The drive takes 16 minutes from Invercargill.
Other nearby places to visit include the Greenpoint Ship Graveyard and Ōmaui.
