Bathurst is another inland county, lying nearly due west of Cumberland, but not adjoining it, which may deserve to be briefly described. In looking over a map of the colony of New South Wales, it appears strange that counties, like this, comparatively remote both from the capital and from the sea, should be more known and flourishing than others lying betwixt them and these important objects. But when we reflect upon the nature of the country, and remember that the intervening counties are in a great measure occupied by the Blue Mountains, with their tremendous ravines and dreary sandstone wastes, all wonder will cease at finding the green pastures and smiling country beyond the mountains occupied, while the rugged tract is suffered to remain for the most part in its natural state, and instead of becoming populous itself, is employed only as a channel of communication between the consuming population on the coast and the producing population of the more fertile interior. Bathurst is in length seventy-two miles, and in breadth sixty-eight, in shape somewhat approaching to an irregular square. No part of this district was explored before 1813. It is, in general, a kind of broken table-land, in some places forming extensive and bare downs, as, for instance, Bathurst Plains, containing 50,000 acres. Occasional open downs of this kind, and not unlike the South Downs in England, extend along the banks of the Macquarie for upwards of one hundred miles. Bathurst is reckoned one of the most flourishing and desirable situations in the whole colony, and the view of these plains from the high land to the eastward upon the road from Sydney is very interesting. The prospect of an extensive district naturally destitute of timber is rare in Australia, and therefore it surprises and pleases the eye of the traveller. Bathurst Plains form, however, by no means a dead level, but consist rather of a series of gentle elevations, with intervening flats of moderate extent; the surrounding forest is rather thin, and patches of it extend irregularly to some distance in the plains, like points of land projecting into a lake.