A Mining Heritage Trail on Daylesford’s Cornish Hill Reserve was officially opened on Sunday.
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Cornish Hill, the collective name for the site encompassing Argus and Italian Hill was mined for 100 years.
The trail includes a series of seven interpretive signs marking existing tracks between some of the important sites at the reserve, including Thomas' Lookout, Bonnard’s Shaft, Mitchell’s and Colliers Shaft, the Argus Mine and Cornish Battery, the Adit and water race, the Water Wheel site and Scascighini Puddler.
The signage provides a brief synopsis of each site’s importance as well as a scannable quick response code, which a person can scan with their phone to take them to a website with a more comprehensive description of what they are viewing.
The trail was launched on the site where Giuseppi Scascighini once puddled the material from his mine.
After Eureka, Scascighini went on to own a small house block on which he built his miner's cottage, just adjacent to the puddler.
Gold mining took place on the site from the 1850’s well into the twentieth century.
Daylesford is regarded as one of the least preserved relics of all the gold sites, with very little relics remaining there, so it’s important to remember the history of it.
- Ian Scott
Mining techniques varied from simple panning for alluvial gold in the streams to deep, hard rock mining seeking quartz reefs and the gold contained within them.
Deep lead mining, which involved miners following ancient water courses below the lava flows from the eruption on what is now known as Wombat Hill, also occurred, but on a lesser scale.
It is estimated that over $250,000,000 worth of gold was recovered from the Cornish Hill site.
Today, the site, including the riparian zone along the river, plateaux and steep hills, wooded in parts, is being restored by the work of the reserve’s Committee of Management, which manages the site on behalf of the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, the Friends of Cornish Hill group, school children and other community groups.
The Committee of Management has contracted a number of people to eradicate weeds, safeguard the goldfields relic and interpret the site.
Gael Shannon said the site created another destination for walkers in a valley that runs from the district’s only freshwater spring down to Lake Daylesford. Ian Scott said the site used to be covered in blackberry and is now completely different to what it looked like a few years ago.
“Daylesford is regarded as one of the least preserved relics of all the gold sites, with very little relics remaining there, so it’s important to remember the history of it.”
Ed Butler said not many people knew the history of the area was so significant until a number of years ago. The trail was awarded grants from the Public Record Office and Hepburn Wind, while Mapsport donated a map of the reserve.
