A slow Sunday in Hepburn Springs

On a Saturday, Daylesford’s main street is full. There are queues at the bakeries and you can spend a while looking for a park. Hepburn Springs is only a few minutes up the hill, but it’s a lot quieter. It’s mostly weatherboard cottages, old guesthouses and the odd Italianate verandah, a leftover from the Swiss-Italian families who settled here in the 1850s. They came for the gold and stayed for the mineral water.

People have been coming to Hepburn Springs to take it easy for well over a hundred years, and Sunday is a good day to do the same.

Breakfast at the Pavilion

Start in the Mineral Springs Reserve at the bottom of the hill. The Hepburn Pavilion Café is in a small Edwardian building from 1908, with leadlight windows, a tiled floor and a high vaulted ceiling. It’s a lovely room to have breakfast in.

The menu is more up to date than the building. There are crumpets with whipped ricotta, and a spiced lamb kofta pastry if you want something more substantial. The Devonshire tea is served all day, so scones with jam and cream at 9am are fair game. Grab a table by the window if you can.

The reserve itself has a longer history than most people realise. It was set aside in 1864, when locals worried that gold mining would wreck the springs, and the Swiss-Italian community pushed hard to keep them open to everyone. By the 1880s, Hepburn mineral water was being bottled and sent all over the country. The land and the springs belong to the Dja Dja Wurrung people, who knew this water long before any of that.

Taste your way along the creek

Bring an empty bottle. There are several mineral springs in the reserve, each with its own tap or pump, and they’re all within an easy walk of each other. The interesting part is how different they taste.

The Pavilion Spring is the original, and the strongest. It’s a sodium bicarbonate water, naturally fizzy and quite sharp, and it divides people. The Hepburn Soda spring, near the café under a huge Giant Redwood, is milder. Locarno, between the playground and the café, has three taps. It’s named after the town in Switzerland that a lot of the early settlers came from. Further down, past the car park, is the Sulphur Spring. You’ll probably smell it before you see it.

Walk along the creek, try a few and fill your bottle from the one you like best.

If the weather’s good, it’s easy to turn this into a proper walk before lunch. The track to Argyle Spring starts at the reserve car park, or at Wyuna Spring, and follows Argyle Gully for 1.4 kilometres. It takes about 25 minutes each way. At the end there’s another spring to try and the remains of the Mother Goose mine, one of the old gold workings in the area. You come back the same way.

Some tracks in the Hepburn Regional Park have been closed after storm damage, so it’s worth checking the Parks Victoria website before you head off. Dogs are fine on a lead.

A detour through the village

If you’ve got more time and good walking shoes, the Swiss-Italian heritage walk starts from the same car park. It’s about 8 kilometres return and takes around two hours. Even if you don’t do the whole thing, a few of the stops are worth knowing about.

The big one is the old Macaroni Factory on Main Road. Brothers Giacomo and Pietro Lucini came out from Intra, on Lake Maggiore, in the 1850s and started their business here in 1859. They baked bread and made macaroni and salami for the local Swiss and Italian community. They also bankrolled gold miners in return for a third of whatever they found. The building went up in the early 1860s and was the family home, and for a few years the Roma Hotel. Their macaroni won a prize at the Melbourne Exhibition in 1880.

What makes it special is inside. Giacomo painted murals across the walls and ceilings in the 1860s, with flags, family scenes and political themes. They’re among the largest and most intact domestic murals of their kind in Australia. You can’t just wander in, but you can stay there: Pietro’s at the Old Macaroni Factory is a private suite in the building.

Along the way you’ll also pass Villa Parma, built in 1864 by Fabrizio Crippa, who mined, ran a butchery and planted an orchard and vineyard. It’s one of the few buildings from the early Spring Creek settlement that’s still largely as it was.

Lunch at Rubens

Rubens @ Hepburn does lunch on Sundays, so plan the day around it. Book ahead and don’t rush it. There’s nothing else on the schedule until the afternoon.

An afternoon at the Bathhouse

After lunch, head back down to the reserve to the Hepburn Bathhouse & Spa, which is what brings a lot of people to Hepburn Springs in the first place.

Bathing here goes back a long way. The first bathhouse opened in 1895 with just two baths, and more were added as people kept turning up. It was extended in the 1920s, rebuilt and doubled in size in 1992, and reopened in 2008 after a $13 million redevelopment. The heritage-listed façade is still there out the front.

There are two bathing areas now. The Bathhouse is the main one and is open to all ages, as long as kids are with an adult. The Sanctuary is quieter and is for over-16s only, so it’s the one to pick if you want some peace. Spa treatments are booked separately if you’d like to add one.

Give yourself a couple of hours either way. You’ll come out feeling pretty sleepy, so it’s worth not having much else planned afterwards.

A drink at the Bellinzona

Finish the day on Main Road at Hotel Bellinzona. If you did the heritage walk, you'll already have passed it. Its story starts in the 1860s, when Battista and Ellen Borsa set up a home and butchery on the site. After Battista died in 1889, Ellen turned it into a guesthouse. It has burnt down twice since, in a bushfire in 1906 and again in 2003, and the building you see now is bigger than the old one but keeps a lot of its original look.

These days you can call in for a drink in the Lobby Lounge, or stay on for an early dinner at The Virgin Kitchen, the hotel's restaurant, which is open on Sunday evenings. Book if you're planning to eat, and if the weather's kind, ask for a table in the garden.

Or stay the night

Better still, skip the drive and stay over. There are plenty of places to stay in Hepburn Springs, and it means Monday morning can be slow too.