Wrights Hill Fortress

In suburban Karori, under a hillside that most Wellingtonians walk their dogs over, there is a Second World War fortress with six hundred and twenty metres of underground tunnels.

Wrights Hill Fortress was built between nineteen forty-two and forty-four to defend Wellington Harbour from Japanese naval attack. Three gun pits were carved into the hilltop, connected by tunnels to magazines, plotting rooms, engine rooms, and crew quarters — at points over fifty feet underground. The nine-point-two-inch guns could hurl a hundred-and-seventy-two-kilogram shell thirty kilometres out to sea.

The fortress was designed for a hundred and ninety-five personnel. It never had more than twenty at any one time. Only two of the three planned guns were ever installed. They were never fired in anger. The Japanese navy never came.

After decommissioning in the nineteen-fifties, the guns were cut up for scrap in nineteen-sixty and sold to Japan. The guns built to fight Japan were bought by Japan. Nobody involved seems to have appreciated the irony.

But here's the detail that connects Wrights Hill to modern Wellington. When Peter Jackson's team was working on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the sound designers needed a specific kind of reverberating echo for the Mines of Moria sequences. They came to the tunnels of Wrights Hill Fortress. The booming, cavernous sound of Moria — one of the most memorable audio environments in film history — was recorded in a forgotten military bunker in Karori.

The fortress opened to the public on ANZAC Day nineteen eighty-nine. You can walk the tunnels. It's dark, it's cold, and it sounds exactly like the Mines of Moria. Because it is.