Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel)
CA36 Sec7 Mount Blackwood Road PENTLAND HILLS, MOORABOOL SHIRE
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Statement of Significance
The ruin of an ashlar bluestone and sandstone hotel building, built in 1864, on the route to the Mt Blackwood gold fields. Various related landscape elements potentially of this period, survive.
It is of local historical significance as a representative embodiment of a way of life and the social values of the 1860s and for its association with a significant event, the rush for gold. It has scientific significance for its archaeological research potential as a cultural research document. It retains social significance as a landmark known and valued by the community for orientation.
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Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel) - Physical Conditions
Reasonable. Overgrown.
Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel) - Intactness
Ruin. Derelict.
SIGNIFICANT INTACT ELEMENTS:
MATERIALS .
HEDGES.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL. POTENTIAL. RUIN.
TREES.
Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel) - Physical Description 1
A ruin, of ashlar bluestone with sandstone dressings. It consists of the left hand half of a room with a fireplace in the centre of the side wall. The chimney is dressed sandstone with a capping mould.
The remainder of the building is easily recognisable from footings and piles of fallen wall stone, although a considerable amount of original stone has been removed from the site. Two circular, stone-lined wells are near the northern side of the ruin, one of which has been filled with rubble. Several garden and landscape features remain. At left, Hawthorn hedges form yards around the ruins and a larger paddock to the south.
Other features include a pile of stone and brick near the south west corner of the main building, probably from a detached kitchen . Two collapsed stone structures about twenty-five metres north-west of the main building, which may have been stables or other outbuildings, a large circular paved area about thirty metres to the west . This last feature is unusual It comprises a platform paved with large basalt field boulders, with a rectangular space two by one metres in the centre and a narrower trench on the western side. It is unclear what this was for, but it may have been some form of stockyard, or very possibly, the site of a horse works, for driving some form of machinery, such as a chaff cutter. A large earth dam lies a further fifty metres to the south-west.
Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel) - Physical Description 2
Landscape. The paddock adjacent to the ruin is surrounded by a Hawthorn hedge (Crataegus monogyna), a widely used hedge species used in Victoria, as it is in England. Trees are clumped near the gate on the north side, and there is a backdrop of one extremely good Pinus sp. and Poplar.
Plant species include: Ulmus procera, English Elm. Crataegus monogyna, English Hawthorn. Pinus pinea?,Stone Pine. Populus tremula, Aspen.
Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel) - Historical Australian Themes
Community life/ Governing
Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel) - Usage/Former Usage
USE: Derelict ruin.
PREVIOUS USE: Hotel.
Heritage Study and Grading
Moorabool - Bacchus Marsh Heritage Study 1995
Author: Richard Peterson and Daniel Catrice
Year: 1995
Grading:
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MT BLACKWOOD HOTEL SITEVictorian Heritage Inventory
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Mount Blackwood Hotel Ruins (Drury's Hotel)Moorabool Shire
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