While the nearby Blue Mountains attract most of the
tourists, the Capertee district has stunning landscapes which are the equal of
its better known neighbour. The local tourist office tries its best to promote
the district, and recently described the Capertee Valley on its website, as an
area of ‘spectacular scenery and timeless beauty’. Surprisingly talking about the charms of the region is not a
recent development. One of the first people to promote the tourist
potential of the area was a letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1888. This anonymous correspondent took
exception to an earlier report in the paper that ignored the scenic qualities
of the Capertee area in a story about railway tourism within the state.
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| Crown Ridge looking East, watercolour by Conrad Martens Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW |
SCENERY ON THE RAILWAY LINES
To a sub-leader of October 29 you make mention of the
scenery along different lines of our railways, but I notice with regret that
you omit mention altogether of the Mudgee line from Ben Bullen to Ilford, a
distance of about 20 miles, the railway skirts the vast depression of the Capertee
Valley, and as the train winds around the Crown Ridge, near Capertee Station,
and further on by Carlos Gap and Brogan’s Creek, the view is in my opinion
unequalled on any line of railway in the colony. The tremendous masses of
Hawkesbury sandstone, in many cases showing a perpendicular unbroken face of
300ft., towering higher and yet higher in the distance, until the Bulga
Mountains overlooking Singleton can be distinctly seen, and the lofty cone-shaped
Tien Peak with its trigonometrical station at its summit, present all weathers
one of the finest spectacles of rugged mountain scenery in Australia.
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