Five Clydesdales – Clinton

Clinton, Otago, New Zealand

Roadside giants

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Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A group of five larger-than-life Clydesdale horse statues in central Clinton.

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

No recommended arrival yet

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Five Clydesdales – Clinton

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Site-level location · 46.2023° S, 169.3760° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

Five Clydesdales stand in the middle of Clinton, and the number is what makes it work.

A single draught horse is a statue. Five of them, larger than life, standing together in a small South Otago town, become a team – which is precisely what Clydesdales were. These animals worked in harness, in fours and sixes and eights, and a group is the only honest way to depict what they actually did in this country: ploughing, carting, breaking in land, hauling everything that moved before tractors arrived.

The local sculptor David Mackie made them, and Clutha NZ promotes them as a town-centre attraction and a symbol of Clinton's agricultural history.

South Otago is heavy country – rolling, wet, fertile, and hard work to farm before machinery. The Clydesdale is the animal that made it possible, and the breed's decline was almost total once tractors became affordable after the Second World War. Within about two decades an animal that had been the basis of agriculture nearly disappeared from working farms.

That gives the group a slightly elegiac quality that a single horse would not have. It commemorates not just a breed but a way of farming that ended within living memory.

Clinton sits on State Highway 1 between Balclutha and Gore, so the horses are seen by a good deal of traffic heading south. The town is otherwise best known for a long-running joke about the road sign to Gore, its neighbour up the highway.

The installation date are simply not known.

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PRACTICAL

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WHAT TO EXPECT

Current Clutha NZ destination material actively promotes the five Clinton Clydesdales as a town-centre attraction and credits local sculptor David Mackie.

ACCESS

The five Clydesdale sculptures stand at the central Clinton rest-stop display. The sculpture-group site is map-checked from a recorded GPS waypoint and corroborated by current Clutha destination material. Direct navigation is withheld until a current lawful parking/arrival point is independently verified.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

Gore’s giant leaping brown trout has been a town icon since 1989 and, after a community naming campaign, officially became “Trevor” in 2026.

Roadside giants

35 km away

✓ Recommended arrival recorded

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Clutha NZ – Clinton Clydesdales

Clutha NZ · recorded 2026-08-23

Current regional destination organisation explicitly promotes all five statues in central Clinton.

Tourism

Te Ara – Clydesdale statue

Te Ara - Encyclopedia of New Zealand · recorded 2026-08-23

Authoritative historical context for Clinton Clydesdale sculpture tradition.

Government

What we're still checking

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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