The night builders, and a wall nobody can date
The Menehune are the small people of Hawaiian tradition, said to have been in the islands before the Hawaiians, to work only at night, and to finish anything they started in one night or abandon it. Two of the things attributed to them are real, still standing, and on the National Register of Historic Places.
The first is the fishpond at a bend of the Hulēʻia River south of Līhuʻe on Kauaʻi. Its names are ʻAlekoko, Alakoko, and locally the Menehune Fishpond. A wall about nine hundred feet long cuts a loop of the river off and turns it into a pond, and it may be the first brackish-water fishpond built in the Hawaiian Islands. The usual estimate puts its construction in the fifteenth century, though you will also see much older figures quoted on visitor sites, so treat the age as unsettled. It went onto the National Register on 14 March 1973. There is a lookout on the south side of Puhi Road, which is how nearly everybody sees it.
The second is Kīkīaola, the Menehune Ditch, at Waimea. It is an irrigation ditch that takes water off the Waimea River, and the reason archaeologists talk about it is the stonework: roughly a hundred and twenty cleanly cut and fitted basalt blocks facing about two hundred feet of the outer wall. That kind of dressed, faced stone is unlike the rest of Hawaiian construction, and the tradition hands the job to somebody other than people. The archaeologist Wendell C. Bennett called it the finest stone-faced ditch he knew. It was listed on 16 November 1984.
Go and look at both. The fishpond is aquaculture at a scale that fed a district, and the ditch is agricultural engineering. The Menehune story is the wrapper. What is underneath it is work, done by people, that has outlasted five centuries of weather.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
