Stuart Park Clifftop Track

Stuart Park Clifftop Track is a short walk of 0.9 km, near Titahi Bay in Wellington.

Up off the south end of Titahi Bay Beach and onto the Stuart Park tops, and the climb is most of the walk. The line mapped here runs about 900 metres from the beach entrance to the Mako View top, lifting from roughly 9 metres above the sea to about 96, so a little under 1.8 km if you go out and back the same way. Gravel out of the beach entrance, a short dirt link, then the grass traverse west across the face above Korohiwa Bay, then the pull onto the ridge and out at Mako View. Porirua City Council has a formal route through here as well, the Southern Clifftop Walkway, which it puts at 2.8 km and about an hour return over hilltops with views over Titahi Bay and out to Mana Island, and which it grades Challenging. On top of that the park is threaded with unnamed, unformed paths, which is what people mean when they say you make your own way up here, so read the mapped line as the spine rather than the only route. Now the part that matters most on this page, and it is not the view. Porirua City Council does not simply list Stuart Park as ground where a dog may run. In the council’s own dog control mapping the park is filed under the category "Dog Exercise Area - Pest Control Warning", and the description it carries reads, word for word: "This area has possum control measures in place. To prevent your dog being poisoned, make sure it doesn’t go near carcasses, bait stations, and traps. Dog Exercise Area where dogs can be exercised off leash and under control of the owner/handler." Read that twice. It is bait stations and traps, both, on the same ground the council invites you to let a dog off the lead. So here is the plain version. Keep your dog out of the scrub edge and off anything dead. Do not let it nose a bait station or a trap box, and if you spot one, lead on and walk past. If your dog does take bait or eat a carcass, ring your vet straight away, go in, and take the bait or the animal with you so they know what they are treating. Greater Wellington Regional Council’s own words are worth carrying: dogs are extremely vulnerable to poisoning, and prevention is better than any treatment available for poisoned dogs. Put the after hours vet number in your phone before you park, because the car park is the wrong place to be looking it up. What is actually in the stations needs a date on it rather than a flat answer. The regional council publishes the pest operations layer that Porirua points dog owners to, and reading it on 18 August 2026 the Stuart Park operation, 255.6 hectares and managed by the council, records its toxin as "No toxins at present". That is the record on that day and it is not a promise about the day you go. The two operations sharing a boundary with this park, Porirua Scenic Reserve and Pikarere Farm, both run brodifacoum, which persists in a carcass long after the animal dies and is exactly the secondary poisoning risk a scavenging dog walks into. Nothing on the hill stops a poisoned possum crossing the line before it dies. Trap type is not stated in anything we could read, so we are not going to guess at kill traps or leg holds: treat every trap you see as a hazard. Check the regional council’s live pest operations map before you drive over, and if you want the trap type on record, the council takes enquiries at [email protected]. The off lead grant itself is as strong as they come, and it is not a webpage. Schedule One of the Porirua City Council Dog Control Bylaw 2021, amended October 2023, lists Stuart Park by name in the Dog Exercise Areas schedule; the reserve management record says the council will continue to provide a Dog Exercise Area; and the council’s live dog control mapping agrees. Three council instruments, one answer. The condition riding with it is clause 6.5, continuous control inside a Dog Exercise Area. A dog classified dangerous may not be in a Dog Exercise Area at all, and a dog classified menacing must be muzzled here, because Titahi Bay is a listed Urban Area. Two boundaries narrow that permission and neither of them bends. The first is the western arm. The reserve is 32.91 hectares, but the exercise area the council actually draws on its map is about 24.8 hectares, roughly three quarters of it, and it stops short of the long western coastal arm. The bylaw text says Stuart Park without qualification while the map draws a smaller shape, so the two do not line up. Titahi Bay is an Urban Area where the default outside a Dog Exercise Area is on the lead, so take the conservative reading: off the lead where the council maps it, lead on out along the western arm. The line mapped here stays inside the mapped exercise area end to end. The second is that Porirua’s two datasets disagree with each other on one stretch. Of the four segments of the council’s own Southern Clifftop Walkway, three are recorded dogs off lead and one, the long unsealed southern segment, is recorded on lead only, even though most of it sits inside the mapped exercise area. We are not going to quietly pick the permissive record. On the southern unsealed section the lead is the answer until the council resolves it. Getting there and getting home is street walking, and streets are lead ground. The council’s own recommended circuit says as much: start at South Beach Road along Titahi Bay beach, past the boatsheds and into Stuart Park, exit Moki Street and return to the South Beach access road via Pikarere Street and Arnold Park. Every one of those streets sits inside the Titahi Bay Urban Area, so the lead is on for the walk in and the walk home, and the top of the mapped line comes out on Mako View, which is a street like any other. Clip the lead on before you step off the track. There is a seasonal gate on the beach approach and it is the thing most likely to catch you out. Titahi Bay Beach is a Restricted Area in the same Schedule One: from 1 November to 31 March, between 10am and 7pm, dogs are prohibited on the signed section, and prohibited means even on the lead. The restriction is set by the signs rather than by a line on a map, so read them at the access point rather than trying to work out which metres are closed. Outside those dates and hours the beach itself is off lead. If you are coming on a summer afternoon, skip the sand: a formed gravel footway runs west into the park from the South Beach Access Road end and joins this track a few steps above the beach entrance, so you never have to set foot on the restricted section. And the boatshed stretch is not a vehicle area in the way people assume. The council allows boatshed owners, boaties launching and emergency services through the gated access, so expect the odd vehicle on the sand. Horses are permitted in this park. The reserve management objective is to continue to provide a Dog Exercise Area and to allow horse access and horse riding, so you can meet a horse anywhere on these paths. Think about that honestly before you unclip, because a dog that has never met one on a narrow traverse is a dog you want on a lead when a horse comes round the corner. The coast below is busy. Records show little penguin, kororā, along this shore with sightings inside the last two months, and the recommended approach runs past the boatsheds, which is classic kororā nesting ground. Records also show variable oystercatchers at Titahi Bay this year; they nest as bare scrapes straight onto sand and shingle above the tideline and a running dog will not see them. New Zealand fur seals haul out on this coast too, with records here on and off from 2018 through to last year. So keep the lead on through the boatsheds and along the sand even where the beach is legally off lead, and give any seal a wide berth of at least 20 metres, which protects the seal and the dog both. Those are citizen science records rather than an authority and we will say so, but the ground itself is not in doubt: the reserve sits inside a Greater Wellington Key Native Ecosystem, it is regenerating ngaio and māhoe bush within gorse dominated scrub, and the council holds a memorandum of understanding with the Stuart Park Restoration Group who are doing the work. One thing we will not tell you is that there are dotterels here. The records do not support it at Titahi Bay, and a warning we cannot stand behind makes the ones we can stand behind count for less. There is a lot under your feet as well. The reserve holds the Korohiwa whaling station from the 1830s and 40s, a recorded archaeological site, along with a Ngāti Ira pā site, terraces and midden. Midden is soft shelly ground and it is exactly what a bored dog digs, so keep to the formed paths and move your dog on if it starts excavating. Two last practical notes. The council flags this reserve as landslide susceptible and it sits inside a tsunami evacuation zone, and the walkway here is graded Challenging with the surface running between sealed, grass and gravel. And Hellie, who sent this one in and walks it with Indie, says it is very exposed on a windy day. No authority says that, so take it as terrain rather than as a rule: this is a clifftop hill on an open west coast, there is no shelter on the tops, and the wind at the Mako View end is not the wind in the car park. Carry water for the dog. Hellie’s pin sat out on the beach near the South Beach Road end, which is fair enough given that is the council’s own recommended start, and we have snapped it to the park entrance so the map matches the ground this page describes.

Expect easy going, with around 73 m of climb, and takes about 17 min to walk.

Dogs are welcome here. This walk is on the map because Hellie & Indie suggested it, and we checked it against the source above.