Daily Photo – Bannockburn
Just before reaching Cromwell, near Highlands Motorsport Park (a world-class venue that at one point looked doomed for the scrapheap until Scottish-born entrepreneur and racing enthusiast Tony Quinn injected the necessary funds to see it completed) I decided on a whim to detour 5 kilometres to the small settlement of Bannockburn.
Bannockburn got its start in the days of the Otago Gold Rush and at the height of the gold rush, around 40,000 miners were working claims across Central Otago, with about 10,000 in the Clyde, Cromwell, Bannockburn, Stewart Town area by 1864. Around this time, a story emerged of a chilly spring evening when a handful of miners gathered at one of the numerous watering holes just down the hill from Stewart Town near Bannockburn. After a hard week of sluicing and picking through schist, they were ready to unwind, and as the night grew later, the whisky flowed, the laughs grew louder, and the stories taller.
By the time the last orders came, three miners – let’s call them Jack, Tom, and Bill – discovered that the relationship between their brains and legs had broken down entirely. They began the long stumble back up the hill to Stewart Town in a not-altogether-straight line. As the night deepened, the songs grew louder, the hill steeper, and the gullies all started to look the same. Familiar landmarks blurred in the moonlight. Hours later, the townsfolk woke to faint voices and songs drifting over the hills through the night. At first light, a search party set out and found the trio several kilometres off the usual track, tangled in a scrubby gully, their boots soaked, clothes torn, and nursing hangovers that could floor a crash of rhinoceroses.
These days, all that’s left of Stewart Town are a few crumbling remains on a historic reserve, while Bannockburn itself has a population of around 500 – a number that soars to what feels like 5 billion in summer as holidaymakers flock to Central Otago to enjoy this sun-baked pocket of the country, where golden hills, vineyards, and vast blue skies linger late into the evening. Upon arrival, I drove around for a bit, admiring the remains of old schist buildings that still grace the town, before slipping out across the bridge.