The town of Middlemarch, New Zealand is named after George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. The town is a service center for the local farming community and is the starting point of the Otago Central Rail Trail. The name may have come from the English term “march”, which means a boundary, or from the Northumberland ancestry of the early surveyor.
Sutton Salt Lake is located 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) west of Sutton, in the Strath Taieri, a valley surrounded by high hills.[2] The hills to its north west are the Rock and Pillar Range, and south west the Lammermoor Range.
The Otago Central Rail Trail is a 150-kilometre walking, cycling and horse riding track in the South Island of New Zealand. A pioneering project for New Zealand, the successful rail trail joined the New Zealand Cycle Trail umbrella organisation in 2012, having been one of the inspirations for it.