This is the end of the road, literally.
Slipping under Dunedin's Southern Motorway as it crests Saddle Hill, the old main road winding south out of Fairfield presents drivers with the choice of an on-ramp to its four-lane, no-time-to-waste replacement, or a more leisurely and intriguing journey of discovery up Saddle Hill Rd.
Choosing the country road, my car climbs Saddle Hill's north-facing pommel before tracing its western flank high above Mosgiel housing that spills across Taieri's fertile plain towards the snowy Maungatua range.
A couple of kilometres further on, at the far reaches of the saddle's lesser promontory, an unassuming unsealed Finnie Rd takes its leave to head back towards the coast, revealing expansive sea-and-sky views stretching beyond Taieri Mouth, before dipping and twisting to finish in front of the 141-year-old Finnie homestead.
I am here to meet 84-year-old Max Finnie, who is likely their last.
An icy wind escorts me to the wooden villa's door. No answer. I make my way to the other side of the house and knock on the lesser-used front door. Beyond the seaward end of the veranda an ancient cabbage tree is framed by a vivid-hued rainbow on a background of snow-laden, deep-grey cloud.
Through a large window I spy a fire blazing in an open fireplace.
The door opens to reveal a large-framed man with a full wispy white beard and keen eyes.
Introductions made, and muddy shoes removed, I am invited to pull an armchair next to Mr Finnie's seat within reach of the fire's warmth.
What emerges during the ensuing hours of conversation is Mr Finnie's deep gratitude for all that his forebears and this piece of land have given him.
His great-grandparents, Thomas and Mary Finnie, arrived in Dunedin in 1858 aboard the Gil Blas, from Melbourne, Australia.
According to an Otago Witness account from 1903, the Finnies, Jaffrays and Hunters, who had adjoining farms on Saddle Hill, had been born and raised together in the parish of Mid-Calder, west of Edinburgh, Scotland. They emigrated to New Zealand - first the Jaffrays aboard the Philip Laing in 1848, then the Hunters and Finnies, via Australia, eight and 10 years later.
Mr Jaffray organised the purchase of the land for the Finnies - the original land deed bearing the signature of the colony's third governor, Sir George Grey.
Dunedin, when the Finnies stepped ashore, was a small, muddy settlement of fewer than 200 mostly unpainted wooden buildings, gathered in and around the hollow between Dowling and Stafford streets.
Saddle Hill was a difficult half- day's journey away.
The hill itself was covered in bush and strewn with volcanic rock.
"It must have been a hell of a back-breaking job," Mr Finnie says.
A couple of stone fences on the farm are testament to that early effort.
The original Finnie farm was a 50ha block named Cloverbank.
Here Thomas built first a mud-brick cottage, and then a two-storey wooden farmhouse as the family grew to five children.
Sheep for meat and wool, a few cows for milk and cream, and oats for the horses, were the mainstay of the farm.
I ask what he thinks has been the legacy of that first generation.
"I can answer that quite succinctly," he says.
"The generations since have come from a family of the utmost honesty and integrity, and the finest example of how one would want to live."
Mr Finnie's grandfather, Tom, was the only one of his generation to stay on the farm. He and his wife Ada (nee West) had six boys including Eric who married his first cousin Merle (nee Howden).
The eldest of their four children, Max, was born on February 6, 1928.
Ten years prior, the family had added the Hunters' adjoining 50ha property, known as Brookfield, to their farm.
It was the Brookfield house that Mr Finnie grew up in, later returned to, and expects to end his days in.
"I'm quite satisfied here," he says sweeping his arms wide to encompass all around him.
"Everything works well. I lived here most my life. It's nice and quiet - away from all the hoons in society - and only a quarter-hour from town."
The house did not get electric power until 1953.
"That was really something - the fact that you could just turn a switch on and didn't have to stoke up the coal range before breakfast. It must have been a tremendous burden, particularly for my mother."
As youngsters in the 1930s, Mr Finnie and his siblings attended Brighton School.
We venture outside despite the cold, and Mr Finnie points out the nearby gully they ran down each morning to catch a horse and cart to school. The return trip was longer - a bus to Ocean View and then an hour-long uphill slog.
"There was always a three-course dinner ready by the time we got home."
Farm life offered an enterprising boy several opportunities to earn pocket money, Mr Finnie says.
During the 1930s, his uncle Ted began leasing 30 acres of the farm's lower slopes to run sheep and grow strawberries.
By the age of 10, Mr Finnie was one of his uncle's "regular pickers".
He had another "little sideline" - selling mushrooms.
We begin walking up the gravel farm road, away from the house, towards the base of the steepest section of the saddle's smaller hill.
Mr Finnie says it is mistakenly called Jaffray's Hill, but that that was never a name Mr Jaffray used.
"He always called them 'little hull' and 'big hull'," he says with an appropriate Scottish accent.
The wide grassed gully in front of "little hill" was one of the best mushroom-picking spots.
"We had to get up at about five in the morning to collect and box them in time for Ted to take them to the produce market in town.
"You don't get mushrooms like that now. Lime and superphosphate were the catalysts for improving the soil. But the lime spelt the end of the mushrooms."
Farm, family, school and church were foundation stones in the Finnie world of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Presbyterian church was on the seaward side of the farm, next to the original school, which closed in 1918.
Mr Finnie's "grandpa and granny" still lived in a house on the lower slopes, and would take it week-about to attend church or cook Sunday lunch.
After church the wider family would gather at "the auld house" for an extended afternoon meal and socialising.
"This family gathering was a ritual. You weren't invited, you just went. A gathering of the clan so to speak."
The Finnie farm has been, and continues to be, a world apart.
But not in complete isolation.
When Thomas and Mary picked up their first child and their few belongings, and headed out across the wilderness towards their new life on the side of an unknown hill, they were among a small but significant wave of settlers who arrived in Otago that year and the next. Two years later gold was discovered and the steady trickle became a flood. In the eight years to 1865 the population of Dunedin exploded from 890 residents to 15,000.
It was not long before cream from the farm's cows was being supplied to a local dairy co-operative.
Lamb from Cloverbank was part of New Zealand's first shipment of refrigerated meat to England, aboard the Dunedin in 1882.
Mr Finnie does not recall any particular deprivation as a result of the Great Depression, and he was boarding at King's High School, in Dunedin, during World War 2.
He would bike home each Friday afternoon and cycle back to town early on Monday morning.
Not long after war was declared the entire farm was pegged out in preparation for laying mines if a seaborne Japanese invasion became imminent.
Decades later, Mr Finnie accidentally drove over one of the pegs which had not rotted away and "mangled" a front tyre on his tractor.
By then he had worked in the government tax department, part-owned a meat delivery business, had a year of agricultural training at Lincoln College, married Gaynor (nee Barton), spent a couple of years on a North Island dairy farm, and returned to work on the family farm while living with his young family in Abbotsford.
For 17 years Mr Finnie commuted daily to the farm, where he worked hard.
"I myself admit it was not very satisfactory. It was not fair on the family who were growing up," he states with surprising frankness.
Tractors, water reticulation and electric fencing all helped reduce farm costs and increase production.
But more than a decade of unchanging lamb prices in the 1980s meant some lean years were mixed in with the good ones.
The cumulative knowledge of growing up on land farmed by the same family for successive generations and the rising industrial might of Asia coalesced into a ripe opportunity during the 1970s.
Chinese manufacturers wanted a 34 to 35 micron wool - a measurement ideally suited to the dual-purpose Romneys Mr Finnie ran on his farm.
"It suited both the growth pattern on this property and the Chinese demand. It sort of just fell into my hands."
He kept improving the wool the farm produced, with an eye to winning the prestigious National Golden Fleece awards. He came close.
Eight years ago, at the Taieri A&P Show, a single fleece from Mr Finnie's flock won first prize in the Romney ewe fleece category and took the overall champion fleece all breeds title. The same fleece, entered in the Golden Fleece awards, was judged best Romney ewe fleece.
Two years later, Mr Finnie leased the farm to Douglas and Diane Allen.
They are "good people" who are "carrying on, just the same way I did".
He and Gaynor had shifted back to the old farmhouse in 1994.
Neither of their children is likely to take on the farm, he says. The genesis of their son Stephen's career as a wool buyer and exporter, however, was in working alongside his father for a portion of Mr Finnie's 54 years of hand-shearing sheep.
The grandchildren - and no doubt, in time, the newborn great-grandchild, the seventh-generation Finnie - occasionally visit at the homestead.
This land and this life are in Mr Finnie's blood.
"Great grandfather could have had the pick of the Taieri, but a lot of it was a bog and he didn't want to get his feet wet.
"Unless you've got some sort of grounding in the farm scene, it's not something out-and-out townies would choose."
But he seems reconciled to the fact the farm will "go out of the family after my time".
His only regret, it appears, is that "life is too short".
"I'm no longer able to throw a sheep over the rails in the yard."
Does he not feel some sadness that all of what has been worked for, for so long, by so many of his family, will go to someone else?
"I feel an attachment to this piece of land, from the point of view that it really requires a greater input of capital to make any expansion viable ... but I'm not in a position to do that," he responds.
I don't understand, I say.
We talk for several more minutes, and then the penny drops.
To keep hold of this farm and so let it go backwards would be selfish, and a greater denial of its rich heritage than to pass it to other caring hands.
So the road does not end after all.
There is another bend, and around it, without doubt, another.
Timely award
The Finnie farm is part of an exclusive group to have received Century Farms New Zealand awards.
Started seven years ago, the annual Century Farms awards are made to New Zealand farming families who have owned and worked their land for 100 years or more.
To date, 212 families have received centenary awards and 27 families, including the Finnies, have received sesquicentennial awards, Century Farms chairman Symon Howard, of Lawrence, said.
"Not many businesses can last 100 or more years. It is quite an achievement," Mr Howard said.
"Some of these farms have been here nearly as long as New Zealand, and have made a big contribution to the economy and growth of our country."
Families apply to receive the award.
Application details can be found online at www.centuryfarms.co.nz.
