St. Bathans (non Catholic) cemetery
Pos S 44° 52.415'
E 169° 47.965'
Yes, St. Bathans has two historical cemeteries.
In the townsip itself in Cross Street is the Catholic Church and it has a church cemetery with it.
Down the hill and beside the stream is the alternative cemetery for all other denominitions.
Assuming you travel down from the township there is a clearly signed gate on the left just before where the road crosses the stream.
That gate leads into a working farm paddock so please remember to close the gate afterwards.
A long lane then leads to the cemetery on the face of a hill.Recently (2018) considerable effort has been applied to remove large trees and re-erect the fence, making the site airy and sunlit. A descriptor panel has been erected at the bottom and above are a collection of old style upright headstones, all in very good condition.
This cemetery is still current but intended for local families whose members are already interred...
Much of the mining done in this area was by means of water jets blasting away the gravel and finer materials and running the resultant mix through sluices that trapped the heavier gold particles and leaving the mess to flow on downstream. Most of the streams and rivers had claims on them with large dredges operating in the Clutha River itself. The gold the miners found was weathered from a rock matrix that was difficult to mine directly as there were few if any quartz structures. Quartz is indicative of a geological re-melting process which collects minerals into vein-like structures.
Without this pre-cooking the gold stubbonly stayed within the rock and even now in the one remaining modern mine (McRae's Flat) requires a roasting process before it can be extracted.
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