Tipperary Track (15km)

Centred on Sailors Creek and wrapped around Daylesford, Hepburn and Hepburn Springs, Hepburn Regional Park sits in one of Victoria's most distinctive inland landscapes, where bushland, old goldfields and mineral water country meet. The park is part of the Central Highlands, but it feels different from the taller, wetter forests nearby. Here the terrain is deeply cut by gullies and creek lines, with pockets of ferny shade giving way to drier slopes, old diggings and open forest.

Mineral springs are one of the region's signatures, and they help explain why this area developed such a strong identity beyond its gold rush history. Around Hepburn Springs and Daylesford, groundwater rises through mineral-rich rocks to create the concentration of springs for which the district is famous. Within the park and its adjoining reserves, those springs sit alongside creek flats, historic water races and mining remains, so the landscape often carries both natural and human stories in the same view.

Hepburn Regional Park also lies on Dja Dja Wurrung Country and is jointly managed as part of the Dja Dja Wurrung parks. This is living cultural country, not simply a scenic backdrop, and the broader landscape includes places, stories and materials that long predate the arrival of miners and spa visitors. That deeper continuity matters here because the park's present character is not only the result of forest recovery after clearing and digging, but of much older relationships between people, water and Country.

Another thread running through the region is volcanism. At nearby Lalgambuk, better known to many visitors as Mount Franklin, an extinct volcano rises from the surrounding forest and adds another layer to the area's geology. Together with the mineral springs, gullied creek country and traces of nineteenth-century mining, it gives Hepburn Regional Park a setting that is unusually varied for a relatively compact part of central Victoria.