Walking into old goldmining days
Central Otago certainly has some strange walks. Many take you back to the goldmining rush and the incredibly harsh life the miners put up with in their craving for gold.
The strangest of these walks is the Bannockburn Sluicings, south of Cromwell. Here hydraulic sluicing – washing gold out of the gravels – was the method of choice. Miners with experience of alluvial mining in California were useful for this. The walk loops around the former Bannockburn goldfield.
You start not far from Bannockburn Bridge and walk up a track towards heavily scarred cliffs. This area is now re-clothed with herb-like foliage, flowering in pretty creamy clusters – a contrast to the barren cliffs beyond. These cliffs were sluiced and mined from 1862 right up until the 1930s.
As I walk further up to the foot of the cliffs I pass large mounds of black tailings, like contorted car tyres. Occasionally I notice an old water race which fed precious water to the mining sites. In fact finding enough water to wash gold out and flush away the waste was the single largest challenge of this type of mining.
I didn’t get as far as Stewart Town which is reached through more of these wounded cliffs. It has the remains of miners’ cottages with pear and apricot trees nearby planted all those years ago by those early miners.
*The 3.5km loop takes nearly 2 hours, starting from Felton Road, about 1.5km from the Bannockburn Bridge over Lake Dunstan.
Another walk I explored was along the Roxburgh Gorge Trail, giving glimpses of a different method of finding gold – dredging. In the 1890s and 1900s large dredges were in action here and what became known as the New Zealand Dredge became the standard round the world.
The Roxburgh Gorge Trail is for cyclists and walkers. It runs downstream from Alexandra towards Roxburgh Dam and has a hole in the middle (I did say these walks are strange, didn’t I?). Because of an argument with a land- owner, the middle section (about 12km, almost a third of the trail) has to be by water, not land! You board a boat at Doctor’s Point which takes cyclists on to Roxburgh Dam usually or walkers back to Alexandra. It is absolutely essential to book the boat ahead. Above: Tailings from the sluicing are strewn at the foot of the hills.