Lyell is the site of a historic gold mining town in the Buller Gorge in the South Island of New Zealand. It lies on State Highway 6, 18 km (11 mi) northeast of Inangahua. Lyell was named by the geologist Julius von Haast after the British geologist Charles Lyell, a friend of Sir George Grey, whose writings had influenced Charles Darwin. One of the miners who worked at Lyell in the 1880s and 1890s was the Irish woman Bridget Goodwin, known as Biddy. The Italian miners later turned to dairy farming in the Lyell area.