Great Dividing Trail

Bendigo Victoria

The Great Dividing Trail offers  a sealed track which leads visitors through some of central Victoria's hidden treasures including deep gorges and fern-lined rivers, to the remnants of the greatest gold rush the world has ever seen. A 260km public walking trail extends across the top of the Great Dividing Range from Bacchus Marsh to Bendigo, allowing recreational walkers and tourists the time to savour central Victoria’s unique combination of gold rush heritage and its natural beauty.

Created by a community-owned organisation, the Great DividingTrail Association (GDTA), the Trail links the old gold rush towns at the heart of Victoria, as well as the forests, hills and lakes, straddling the Great Dividing Range. The track is broken up into four smaller walks. The walk from Castlemaine to Bendigo is called the Leanganook Walk.

The section closest to Bendigo along the Leanganook Walk is the Bendigo Goldfields Walk.  It is 11km in distance and goes from the forested hills above Bendigo at the Sandhurst Reservoir via the southern Bendigo suburbs to the Bendigo Railway Station. The mining wealth of this striking central Victorian city was primarily won in the hundreds of kilometres of shafts and tunnels now under the imposing civic buildings, broad streets, parklands and suburbs of the present-day city of Bendigo. Between the reservoir and Bendigo, the walk passes through a regrowth box-ironbark forest, originally devastated by mining and recently included in a series of national parks to conserve this endangered forest type.

Length: 57 kilometres
Walk: 3 days
Track: Moderate
Grade: Easy/medium
Start: Corner Forest and Wheeler streets, Castlemaine
Finish: Lake Daylesford
Nearby: Castlemaine
Permits/bookings: None required
Best time: Spring or autumn.

The Dry Diggings Track is part of the Great Dividing Trail, a superb 260 kilometre trail that, when completed, will connect the towns of Ballarat, Bendigo, Daylesford and Bacchus Marsh.

The walk takes you through a diverse series of historic mining landscapes where gold was first discovered in the 1850s, and the main spa areas of Vaughan, Glenluce, Hepburn and Daylesford.

There are three main legs of the trip:

• The section between Castlemaine and Vaughan is 17 kilometres and follows the historic Poverty Gully water race through the extensive goldfields of Eureka, Spring Gully and Fryerstown.
• The section between Vaughan and Mt Franklin is 23 kilometres through the isolated and ruggedly beautiful Upper Loddon State Forest.
• Another 21 kilometres takes you from Mt Franklin to Hepburn Springs and Daylesford through the northern park of Wombat Forest and along the Tipperary Track.

As the track ascends the surrounding bush ranges from Ironbark around Eureka in the north to dry box and stringybark to wet, high altitude candlebark and messmate forests at the southern end of the walk.

In late winter, Golden Wattles blooms and during spring, the area is ablaze with wildflowers. The area is home to grey kangaroos, wallabies and echidnas, and birds of many varieties.

The Federation Track between Daylesford and Ballarat will take you past stands of white-trunked manna gums, fertile open farmland and pleasant lakes.