Hutt Valley

The Hutt Valley is a large area of fairly flat land in the Hutt River valley in the Wellington Region of New Zealand, named, like the river, for Sir William Hutt, a director of the New Zealand Company in early colonial New Zealand. The river follows roughly the course of an active geologic fault that continues south as the main driver of the uplift of the South Island's Southern Alps, so the land rises abruptly west of the river while two floodplains have developed to the east, and near Taita the river is briefly confined by a steep-sided gorge before the valley opens into a long triangular plain at Wellington Harbour. The Waiwhetu Aquifer forms from water seeping underground from the Hutt River near Taita and flows down the valley and out under the harbour.