Long & Winding Roads

Pardon me if I've said this before but there is some beautiful country in these parts. Today we took a drive up the old Grafton - Glen Innes road which was the main thoroughfare from the 1870's until the current road was built in 1960.

The road follows a variety of river valleys - the Orara, the Nymbodia, the Boyd - which all eventually become part of the mighty Clarence. Again at the risk of repeating myself these rivers are magnificent. I could spend a lifetime canoeing them although I think that would need to be done in company because in many cases they flow through wild country where you wouldn't want a mishap on your own.

The floods here must be awesome and the evidence of their destruction is everywhere. At the Buccarumbi crossing on the Nymbodia there are still huge steel and concrete columns tossed aside on the banks by a flood in 1946.

The road is just a narrow, winding, largely unsealed track that was built for bullock carts, drays and other pre motorised transport and this would've been the road taken by the Tindal and Ogilvie sons up to the properties they established around Glen Innes in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Trish hopefully scans the banks of the Boyd River at Dalmorton for gold nuggets. You can feel the serenity.

We stopped for a picnic on the banks of the Boyd River at Dalmorton, another of those gold towns that had several thousand people in the late 1800s but are now just a collection of foundations, old shacks and the odd gravestone.

Imagine carving out that by hand!c

About halfway up the road passes through a tunnel hewn out of the rock face of a spur that couldn't be by-passed. We made that our turn around point and headed back to Grafton from there. Just a great day out.