This week, Roy decided he wanted to head towards the Blue Mountains for his weekly outing. The weather has been very changeable recently, and he is finding the hot weather, after the cold days hard to deal with, so escaping the heat in the cool mountain air sounded perfect to him! He loves the Blue Mountains, and knows lots of his online friends also enjoy the area. There are many popular tourist destinations to see, but there are also fascinating places to visit which are less well known, like the lily pond which is beside the Great Western Highway.
If you would like to visit the Lily Pond it is located beside the Great Western Highway at Faulconbridge. It's on the side heading up the Mountains towards Katoomba. It is a beautiful place to stop and have a picnic and there is a picnic table and shelter just beside the pond, but there isn't a lot of room to run around or kick a ball. The pool is also quite deep in places, and is unfenced facing the picnic area, so make sure to keep an eye on young children.
The lily pond at Faulconbridge is a beautiful place to visit, but it also has an important history. At first it appears to simply be a natural pool which has filled with water lilies, bounded by water-loving grass and a smooth, flat sandstone shelf. However, the pool is anything but natural. The pool was 'constructed' between 1864 and 1865, being dug out as stone was removed to be used in building the railway. The stone cut from Faulconbridge was used in building up the railway track and in making stone butresses to keep the built up railway line in place. The pool itself is actually one of two quarrys at Faulconbridge which provided rock for the project, the other, smaller one being on the other side of the railway.
Of course, being a quarry it must originally have not been filled with water. After all, excavating stone out of the quarry would have been very difficult had the stone all been underwater! There was originally a channel cut in the edge of the quarry which drained water, but in the 1970s, it was properly blocked to allow the lily pond to be created in its current form. Before that, the channel had silted up and the quarry filled with water which was used for watering stock and even as water for road-plant machines, like steam-powered steamrollers! When Roy visted, the pond was also teeming with life, full of tiny native fish which flitted about in the shallow edges of the pool. We don't know how the fish arrived at the pond, but think they may have been released there when the lilys were planted.
