Middlemarch, New Zealand

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Middlemarch is a small town (population 300) within the limits of Dunedin city. It lies some 80km to the west of the city centre, at the foot of the Rock and Pillar Range of hills in the broad Strath-Taieri valley, through which flows the middle reaches of the Taieri River.

Middlemarch is mainly a service town for the local farming community. It is the terminus of the Taieri Gorge Railway, and the start of the Otago Central Rail Trail.

Several suggestions exist about how the township was named. One is that Mrs Alice Humphreys, whose husband Edward Wingfield Humphreys owned and had surveyed for sale of sections in this new township, was reading George Eliot's novel Middlemarch. Another is that the name is from the obsolete English term "march" meaning a boundary - in this case a middle area between two rivers. As with many places in and close to the Maniototo area, its name may have been influenced by the Northumberland ancestry of early surveyor John Turnbull Thompson (there is a Middle March region in Northumberland, centred around the town of Otterburn).

Coordinates: 45°31′S, 170°07′E