Blue Lake is a small

lake A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much large ...

adjacent to the town of

Saint Bathans St Bathans, formerly named Dunstan Creek, is a former gold and coal mining town in Central Otago, New Zealand. The settlement was a centre of the Otago Gold Rush, but mining has since long ceased. It is now largely a holiday retreat due to the p ...

in Central Otago,

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

. The lake is

man-made Artificiality (the state of being artificial or manmade) is the state of being the product of intentional human manufacture, rather than occurring naturally through processes not involving or requiring human activity. Connotations Artificiality ...

, the result of

sluicing In syntax, sluicing is a type of Ellipsis (linguistics), ellipsis that occurs in both direct and indirect interrogative clauses. The ellipsis is introduced by a ''wh''-expression, whereby in most cases, everything except the ''wh''-expression is e ...

operations that began in 1873 when John Ewing (1844–1922) formed the St.Bathans Channel Company, to mine the Kildare Hill Gold Claim in St Bathans. His company constructed a tailings channel and introduced hydraulic elevating to work the claim. As this work progressed the Kildare Hill Claim became the site of the deepest hydraulic elevating operation in the world, that would turn a 120-metre hill into a 68-metre hole. Work stopped in 1902 when there was insufficient fall in the tailings channel to carry away the tailings. By 1905 John Ewing was bankrupt as a result of poor investments in other locations. The Kildare Hill Claim was then taken up by the Scandinavian Water Race Company in that year. This company restarted operations and worked the claim until 1932, when it was finally abandoned due to the fear of undermining the town of St Bathans. Natural drainage from the surrounding hills filled the hole with water and created the present day lake. The Blue Lake is a key feature of modern-day St. Bathans and is used for swimming, fishing, bodyboarding, and kayaking.

Sources

* ''Guide to the Otago Goldfields Heritage Trail'', Gerald Garrick Cunningham, 2004 Lakes of Otago {{Otago-geo-stub