Travelling and Communicating

The most obvious gateway to the New England Tableland is the Moonbis. Taking this steep haul northward the traveller by car passes up from the Liverpool Plains and the valley of the Peel, through seeming air-borne stages, to the high country. Hitherto in ruins, an old stone outhouse belonging to the Moonbi Inn, at the foot of the first Moonbi, has lately been rebuilt. It stands now as a relic of the era of bullock teams and horses, for which this was a much harder road. It evokes images of bullockies stopping for a bender, either before they goaded their charges up the escarpment, or after they had come with relief southward down its slippery slopes.Another inn at Dorothy's Downfall at the foot of Duval's - later Devil's - Pinch, between Armidale and Guyra, conjures echoes of yarns, jokes and advice swapped backwards and forwards, and of songs and ballads sung to the 'banjoes, fiddles and bones'. Such sites were like punctuation marks, points of relief during long, hard journeys. Who now knows the site of the inn at the foot of Sinclair's Lookout, west of Glen Innes on the way to Matheson, or of that at the foot of Bolivia Hill? However, the Red Lion Tavern still stands at Glencoe,creating as it has always done a slight bend in the road and acting as a latter-day reminder of other times.