Access

In Ross, follow signs to the information centre, where SH6 does a sharp 90 degree turn. There is parking by the heritage centre and toilets.

Track

Following the track anticlockwise, pass the Old Gaol, reconstructed water wheel and sluice nozzle and continue on the rough section of Mt Greenland Road.

After 15 minutes, a signposted foot track leads into the forest and climbs to join an old section of the water race. Look for excavations alongside the track, old pipes, tunnels, timber and stone works. There is an evocative relic miners hut near the dam and sluice gate.

Traverse the picketed cemetery before descending via St James St back to the carpark.

European History

Early sluicing at Ross commenced in 1865 with watercourses being diverted to flow over the gravel faces, causing a collapse. Low pressure nozzles were soon replaced with high pressure ones.

Shafts were sunk and horses used to ascend and lower cages. When steam power arrived in 1868, poppet heads materialised like metal triffids over the Jones Flat. The clang of machines went day and night as shafts were sunk deeper under the West Coast coastal plain. Groundwater seepage into the tunnels finally put paid to deeper excavations and by 1872 underground mining was abandoned.

Ground sluicing followed. This technique exploited the cliff faces of moraine by systematically disassembling them using high speed water jets. An elaborate water race channelled water to the cannons, which forced the fluid through a decreasing diameter pipe, to finally be released with force. By directing the nozzle, the gravels could be dislodged from the working face. The fine rock was then washed over sluice boxes, where gravity separated the heavier gold from the finer sand.

Hydraulic sluicing was responsible for nearly 40,000 ounces of gold being recovered from the Mont d’Or Mine. The elaborate system of dams, water races, sluice gates, piping, ditches, tunnels and flumes became the infrastructure with which the gold was won.

Mining in the Ross area ceased in 1897.