Passing Through

"This is memory territory. Changing gears up through the Moonbies through Bendemeer, Uralla unparched Armidale, the Pinch, Black Mountain, Guyra, Llangothlin, Glencoe - unalliterative buggers - stage coach settlements like tableaux in a mystery cycle: warts on the knuckles of the tablelands" --Jack Bedson, 'New England Idyll' At Stonehenge, between Glen Innes and Glencoe, let us pull off the highway, in our imagination, to stretch our legs. There is a recreational area, here in the middle of nowhere, with poplar trees and picnic facilities, and white wooden fencing enclosing an oval. One can walk across to inspect the remarkable granite outcrops which give the district its name, and which might almost be enormous sculptures. The air is clean, the views are extensive. The turf is lightly covered with sheep droppings. The only sound is of the big trucks hammering along the highway. In the middle distance, beyond the rocks, the old railway line still crosses the open landscape. No trains have passed this way for many years. The track, where it still exists, and the embankments, the cuttings, the wooden bridges - modelled on the ones designed by Brunel for the extension of the Great Western Line into Devon and Cornwall - all have fallen more or less into ruin, have become a kind of monument, a sad memorial to an era in which the railway, rather than the highway, was the spinal cord of the region.