Old Great North Road - Clare's Bridge

The Dubbo Gully and Ten Mile Hollow Circuit is one of the great multi-day walks of New South Wales — and one of the most historically layered. Over two days and one night, this loop through Dharug National Park traces some of the earliest colonial infrastructure ever built on the continent: convict-constructed roads, stone bridges and pastoral tracks that have been largely untouched since the mid-twentieth century.

This is not a walk about scenery alone. It is an encounter with the lived experience of the convict road gangs — up to 720 men who quarried, shaped and laid the sandstone that became the Great North Road between 1826 and 1836 — and with the pastoral families, the failed township dreams, and the quiet persistence of the Dharug people on whose Country all of this unfolded.

The loop follows parts of the World Heritage-listed Great North Road passing through a landscape that still holds its evidence: Clares Bridge (arguably the oldest surviving stone bridge on the Australian mainland), the ruins of St Thomas's Anglican Church, the Fairview Homestead and the Upper Mangrove Mountain Cemetery, where at least 21 early settlers rest in bush that has changed little in over a century.