Coal Mines Circuit, Tasman Peninsular
On the weekend of the 25/26th of June 2022, Col and I had planned to get away for a walk somewhere. Unfortunately, a couple of afternoon shifts at the end of the week meant I didn’t finish work until 2am Saturday morning, so we needed to find something relatively close.
Our pick ended up being the walk to Mt Brown and Crescent Bay near Port Arthur, which we decided to do on the Sunday morning after staying the Saturday night at Eaglehawk Neck. But we arrived at Eaglehawk Neck early enough on the Saturday afternoon that we though we’d have time to at least get in a short walk, which led us to find the Coal Mines Circuit near Saltwater River, which AllTrails suggested we’d be able to do in about an hour.
Location
The track is located in the northwest corner of the Tasman Peninsular, just past Saltwater River, and is about an hour and a half drive from Hobart (or 30 minutes from Eaglehawk Neck).
The Track
The site clearly caters for tourists and provides a very easy and well graded track through the historic convict coal mines site. The site apparently housed around 600 convicts during its peak
The main settlement area has some impressive sandstone ruins of what was clearly a large complex.
From the main site, we took a brief detour down to the beach.
After which we continued on to Plunkett Point.
We then continued along the Incline Plane Walk to the mine shaft.
We continued past the shaft and back down the hill to the military officers quarters.
From there it was back to the main settlement, where we checked out the solitary punishment cells, before continuing on back to the car.
All up, it was a very easy and enjoyable walk, with the complete circuit only taking us an hour to do.
