We are a not-for-profit organisation. Your donation supports the conservation of this World Heritage site
Help protect this UNESCO site
Heritage Accommodation on a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Longford, Tasmania · 20 minutes from Launceston
The estate is quiet by seven. The last day visitors left at half-past six, and in the hours since, the light has done something remarkable: it has fallen long and amber across the sandstone walls, turned the rose garden to copper, and left the convict-built outbuildings looking exactly as they must have looked in 1840, when the men who built them were still living inside.
You pull a chair outside your heritage cottage with a glass of something cold. Or stay in, beside the fireplace, while the old stones settle and the paddocks go dark around you. The only sounds are the kind that belong here.
This is where you base yourself for northern Tasmania. Not in a Launceston hotel, not in a cabin park on the edge of town. Here, on a UNESCO World Heritage estate in the Longford valley, seventeen minutes from the airport and twenty minutes from Launceston, with six Georgian stone cottages and eighteen original heritage buildings and five thousand roses in the garden, and a story that most of Australia has never heard.
What follows is a practical itinerary. It is also, we think, the best possible way to spend three nights in northern Tasmania, with notes on how to extend to five nights without running out of reasons to stay.
Geography is the first argument. Woolmers Estate sits in Longford, at the heart of a region most visitors navigate poorly. From here, you are twenty minutes from Launceston. Forty minutes from Ross. Fifty-five minutes from the Mole Creek caves. An easy drive from Evandale, Deloraine, the Tamar Valley and Ben Lomond. The Heritage Highway runs practically past the front gate.
The second argument is what happens after half-past six in the evening.
Day visitors to Woolmers leave at closing time. The cottages stay. So once the last car has pulled out of the car park, you have the run of a UNESCO World Heritage estate: the rose garden, the outbuildings, the convict-built stone structures dating to the 1820s. You walk where convict labourers walked during the Assignment System, a chapter of Australian history almost entirely absent from the popular narrative. No chains. No cells. Skills instead, and eventually, for many of the men assigned here, freedom.
General admission to the estate, the Unshackled digital convict experience, and the National Rose Garden are all included in your accommodation. Six cottages sleeping between two and six guests, from two hundred and fifty dollars a night. The Servants Kitchen opens for breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea if you want someone else to make the coffee on arrival day.
That leaves the rest of northern Tasmania, which is considerable.
Arrive in the afternoon and resist the urge to drive anywhere. You do not need to. Woolmers Estate is a full-day destination in its own right, and your admission is already paid.
Start at the Unshackled exhibition in the Nigel Peck Centre, which tells the Assignment System story through individual convict histories, each one specific and human and surprising. Then walk the grounds. Eighteen original buildings, none of them reconstructions. Stone cottages where assigned servants slept, ate, argued and, in time, began to call this place home.
The National Rose Garden is five thousand roses across four hundred and sixty varieties, at its most spectacular from October through to February, but worth a walk in any season. The walled garden behind Woolmers House is older still, its geometry unchanged since the Archer family planted it in the early colonial period.
After the estate closes to day visitors, walk the grounds again. The sandstone holds the day’s warmth long after dark. The rose garden in the evening quiet is a different place entirely from the rose garden at midday.
Set an alarm. The walk from Woolmers to Brickendon Estate is 2.8 kilometres along a flat route through farmland, and you want to arrive by ten-fifteen, when the daily animal feeding takes place.
Brickendon is the other half of a story that Woolmers begins. Both estates share a UNESCO World Heritage inscription. Both were owned by branches of the Archer family, colonial Tasmania’s great pastoralists, and both were built in large part by convict labour during the 1820s. The seventh generation of Archer descendants still farms here today. When you walk the convict trail between the two properties, you are following a route that assigned servants walked two hundred years ago, moving between the estates as the season’s work demanded.
The animal feeding at ten-fifteen draws families, but do not let that put you off. There is something affecting about the quiet competence of the Brickendon staff among these animals, against these stone buildings, in a landscape that colonial ambition shaped and convict hands built.
Allow two hours at Brickendon, then walk or drive back to Woolmers for lunch at the Rose Garden Cafe.
Afternoon: Marakoopa Cave and TrowunnaLast admission to Clarendon Estate is three o’clock, so leave Woolmers by one-thirty at the latest. The nineteen-minute drive brings you to one of the finest Georgian mansions in the southern hemisphere, set alone in open farmland with the kind of symmetry and scale that stops you in the driveway. The National Trust property has been here since 1838. Allow a full hour inside.
From Clarendon, Evandale is nine minutes. The town has changed very little since the nineteenth century, its streetscape of Georgian sandstone buildings so intact that a heritage overlay protects the entire commercial centre. On Sunday mornings the market takes over Russell Street, filling the village with locals and visitors moving unhurriedly between antiques and fresh produce. On other days it is pleasantly quiet, with good coffee and a pace that invites lingering.
Drive home to Longford with the evening light still in the paddocks.
The west today. Mole Creek is fifty-five minutes from Woolmers Estate historic accommodation, and the route takes you through Deloraine, which you will stop in properly on the way home.
The Mole Creek Karst National Park contains more than three hundred limestone caves, most of them unlit and accessible only to those who know where to look. Marakoopa Cave is the one to book: the underground chamber tour ends in complete darkness, the ceiling alive with thousands of glow worm larvae, a slow silent light show that requires no embellishment. Book in advance, particularly in summer, when it fills.
Twelve minutes from the cave entrance, Trowunna Wildlife Sanctuary has been working with Tasmanian devils for decades and operates a serious conservation programme rather than a performance. The wombats are enormous and entirely unbothered by visitors. The quolls move fast and are improbably beautiful. The devil encounter is handled quietly, with evident care for the animals, and is better for it.
Drive home through Deloraine, thirty-nine minutes from Woolmers. Tasmania’s most culturally active inland town has a main street of galleries, bookshops, cafes and craft studios that punches well above its size. The Great Western Tiers rise directly behind it. Stop for coffee and a walk if there is light left. The road back to Longford is easy.
Start early and drive the twenty minutes into Launceston. Cataract Gorge is five minutes from the CBD: a natural gorge carved by the South Esk River, its walls rising thirty metres, a Victorian-era formal garden planted at the floor and a chairlift crossing the top. Walk one side and return on the other. The loop takes an hour and earns its reputation as the best free attraction in Tasmania.
If you are there on a Saturday morning, the Harvest Launceston market at the Tramsheds is worth building your schedule around. Local producers, serious cheese, good bread, excellent coffee, and the kind of conversation that happens when people who grow things meet people who want to know how they did it.
Leave Launceston by eleven and drive to Josef Chromy, twenty minutes south. One of Australia’s most awarded cool-climate wine estates, it produces Pinot Noir and sparkling wines that have drawn serious attention from serious critics for long enough that the attention is no longer surprising. Lunch is served from eleven-thirty until two-thirty, in a restaurant that treats Tasmanian produce with genuine respect and looks out over twenty-two hectares of vines and a lake. This is the right pace for a last afternoon: no agenda, good wine, somewhere worth sitting until the bill arrives.
Launceston Airport is a short drive from the cellar door. The road is easy and the timing, if you have managed it well, is perfect.
Day 4 – Launceston and Josef Chromy is written as your departure day because it ends closest to the airport and makes the most sense as a final morning regardless of how long you stay. If you are extending to 5 nights, simply do Day 5 and Day 6 before the Launceston and Josef Chromy itinerary.
The Heritage Highway runs south from Longford through one of the most intact colonial landscapes in Australia. Today you follow it, stopping at each town in turn, the Midlands plain opening out on either side and the story of early colonial Tasmania assembling itself stop by stop.
Campbell Town is the first, twenty-five minutes from Woolmers. It is small and unhurried, with a heritage walk along the main street and the Red Bridge over the Elizabeth River, built by convict labour in 1838 and still in daily use. Allow thirty minutes before continuing south.
Ross is twenty minutes further. The carved sandstone bridge over the Macquarie River remains the main event: completed in 1836 by Daniel Herbert, an Irish-born convict stonemason whose skill was exceptional enough to earn him a full pardon. The panels are extraordinary, each one unique, faces and animals and Celtic knotwork cut by a man who had everything to gain from the quality of his work. Walk the bridge slowly. The Ross Village Bakery, trading since 1832, makes scallop pies of near-mythological status in Tasmanian food writing. Buy one and eat it by the river.
Continue south to Oatlands, thirty minutes beyond Ross. This is the largest collection of Georgian sandstone architecture in Australia, an entire town built from the local stone in the 1820s and 1830s and largely unchanged since. Callington Mill, a restored 1837 windmill, is one of the very few working historic windmills remaining in the country: five storeys of sandstone rising out of the Midlands plain, its sails turning when the wind obliges, exactly as they turned when convict-assigned millers worked the grain two centuries ago.
Drive home to your historic cottage at Woolmers through the long afternoon light of the Midlands.
Two directions. Choose based on weather and temperament.
The Tamar Valley is Tasmania’s wine heartland, running north from Launceston toward the Bass Strait coast through a succession of cellar doors and broad river views. A dedicated day here is unhurried by design. From Woolmers, allow an hour to reach the upper valley, or use Launceston as a staging point and drive north from there. Tamar Ridge, Waterton Hall, Goaty Hill and Velo Wines are among the cellar doors worth building a loose route around. The estuary broadens as you drive north. The competition for your attention is low. The wine is serious.
For something more elemental, Ben Lomond National Park is fifty-nine minutes from Woolmers. The drive up the Jacobs Ladder road, a series of tight hairpin bends ascending the dolerite plateau, is one of the more dramatic pieces of Tasmanian driving. The plateau at the top is stark and wide, snow-covered between June and September, and on a clear day the views extend in both directions toward water. Allow a half-day and dress for the altitude regardless of the season.
Then return to Woolmers for a final night, knowing that tomorrow is Josef Chromy and Launceston and the airport, and that you have used your time in northern Tasmania well.
Check-in from 2pm · Checkout by 10am
Cancellation: 48+ hrs 20% fee · Under 24 hrs 50% fee
Last grounds entry: 4pm
Grounds close: 6:30pm
20 minutes from Launceston
17 minutes from Launceston Airport
FREE entry when bringing interstate or overseas guests
