The house with the bay window is on a corner towards the steep end of Stuart Street. It appears largely unchanged, though there is no evidence of a rabbit infestation, and no snotty Prince Valiant-type lurking about. Warm from the walk and a bit shaken from the steepness, I cautiously traced the property's exterior, peering inside where I could. I wasn't quite up to knocking on the door and asking its perplexed residents if I could scope out their living area and reenact a music video from the '80s, though I did, on a later trip, stick my idiotic hand-drawn 'Architects of the New Dunedin Sound Wanted' flier in their letterbox. I stuck one over a plaque at the Octagon, too, and it remained there for a day or two. No bites.
The other part of the video, the part where the band and co. dance recklessly about a derelict building, was filmed at Cargill's Castle. Built at the behest of Edward Cargill, the son of Otago-colonising William Cargill and brother of Tunnel Beach-commissioning John, this cliffside castle and one-time cabaret joint is resolutely off limits. It stands abandoned on private property behind a dreary beachside housing development. There are no signs announcing its location and it does not exist in brochures and guides. Operating on limited information, I looped the Corstorphine bus route before an intervening driver showed me where to get off. Stepping from the bus in high fog, I made my way through tumbling streets to the nearest publicly accessible point. This turned out to be a grassy field between two houses. A sloping plain led down to the ocean, but its gradient required a clearer day to gauge. The castle, apparently somewhere to the left, was blocked off by a barbed wire fence with a stern warning sign. Through the fence I could see another field, with a stone fence at its far side and gnarled trees beyond that. I presumed the castle lay somewhere near those trees, but the fog made it impossible to tell for sure. I did not fancy my chances of scaling a barbed wire fence unscathed. Had I come all this way for a photo of a fence?
A photo of a fence.
I did the right thing first and knocked on the door of the adjoining property. There was no answer—the occupants must be elsewhere. My conscience satisfied, I snuck round the side and scoped out their backyard, looking for some sort of entrance that would lead on to the castle grounds. Though I had assumed that the nearest property would be my best option for access, it turned out that their territory only extended as far as the next field, meaning the castle itself lay on a neighbour's grounds—and it was not at all clear which one. Feeling at this point that further transgressions were beyond my mettle, I wandered back to the road, deflated, and began the return journey. As I passed the next house up, however, I noticed there was a private road into the property that curved in the direction of the castle. This looked promising. Seemingly no one about, I quickly stole my way along the path and found that it indeed led to the section behind the stone wall I had glimpsed earlier. From this vantage I could finally see the walls of the castle, though they lay behind another barbed wire fence with another stern sign, this time warning of multiple hazards.
I followed the fence until I was out of the view of any of the neighbouring houses, all the while looking for a way in. I fancied an overhanging tree might grant me access but its branches proved to be far too dense. Then I noticed that there was a small gap at the bottom of the fence. If the wire had sufficient give, it might just be possible to crawl underneath. Of course, I would still have to contend with those barbs. My backpack turned out to be an ideal solution. Using its bulk to prop up the wire, I created a space large enough to accommodate my horizontal form, while one of the bag's clips allowed me to safely pin back the lowest row of barbed wire. With this set-up it was surprisingly easy to slide under and reach the castle grounds.
It didn't take long to spot the promised hazards. These ranged from stray metal objects in the overgrown grass to collapsed floors and dangling detritus in the building itself. Keeping it from the public—at least in its current state—was a sensible move. The interior walls bore years of graffiti and there was evidence of smashed bottles on most of the floors. Some rooms were blocked off by gaping holes, so I had to climb through the large beachfront windows (seen accomodating silhouetted figures in the film clip) to cover the whole building. The fog-aided ambiance, slightly unsettling, slightly mysterious, justified every effort I had made to reach this point.
At the perimeter of the Zone.