As you enter the Northland town of Waipu, a sign to your left extends ‘A hundred thousand welcomes’. Excessively friendly in its English form, it’s there as the literal translation of a sign in Scots Gaelic across the road, ‘Ceud Mile Fàilte’. This is the first clue that Waipu, for all it’s unremarkable appearance, has a singular and proud heritage.

The McLeod Pizza Barn and Brewery adheres to the Scottish theme in everything except its menu. The garish tartan wallpaper and highland-y landscapes would be dismissed as Royal Mile tourist tat back home, but here there is something comforting, if a little laughable, about the shortbread-tin pride on show. Laughable too is the borrowing of the name McLeod from the Presbyterian Minister Norman McLeod, who led his predominantly Gaelic-speaking ‘flock’ here in the 1850s. By all accounts – though chiefly those of the rigorous Museum of Scottish Migration down the road – Norman was a strict, unsmiling chap; fanatic, dogmatic, and thoroughly temperate. I can’t imagine he’d have taken kindly to a brewery being named in his honour.

McLeod was born in Assynt, in the rugged north-west of mainland Scotland. After falling out with seemingly everybody of the faith, he left for Nova Scotia to set up his own ministry. Potato blights forced him and his followers – the imaginatively named ‘Normanites’ – to look elsewhere, so they set to work gathering supplies and building ships that would take them to Australia. Gold had recently been struck in Melbourne, attracting a workforce a little too sinful for the Normanites’ pious sensibilities. With a land purchase agreement in New Zealand they ended up in Waipu where, with many speaking only Gaelic, they maintained a tight-knit community for generations to come.

Today Waipu boasts the largest highland games in the Southern Hemisphere, held each New Year’s Day in Caledonian Park. Just down the road is a monument to the settlers topped with a lion rampart, next to a war memorial of Aberdeen granite. The street names – Lochalsh Drive, Nova Scotia Drive, Braemar Lane – speak to the stories of the people who settled here. It can seem reductive, unimaginative even, this constant recycling of old world names found all across New Zealand. But for those who started new lives here, this was their only tenuous link to a faraway home they would never see again.