the gullies. The road is often made of the sandstone itself, and so it is slippery and difficult for horses and vehicles." From the 1820s onwards, the earlier lines of the road were upgraded and although short sections of Cox's Road were later adopted as parts of the local road network (eg. part of Burke Road, Linden and Old Bathurst Road, and Taylor Road, Woodford) most of the original Cox's Road appears to have gone out of use with the completion of new road deviations by convict gangs during the 1820s and 1830s. When Mrs Louisa Meredith travelled through the area in 1839 she still endured the jolting and bumping over the "jumpers", the rock steps of Cox's Road and she wrote also that 'The track we are now traversing usually winds "terrace-wise along the side of a steep mountain, and is barely wide enough anywhere to allow of two vehicles passing each other". Description William Cox had been instructed by Governor Macquarie only to open a rough cart road, so that the new lands found in the western plains would be symbolically open. The road from Emu Ford to Bathurst, a distance of was completed in only six months. Macquarie's instructions specified that the road should be at least wide in order that two carts would be able to pass each other, and that the timber should be cleared on each side so that the road corridor was wide. Stumps were to be grubbed out and any holes should be filled in. This was the method adopted in relatively easy terrain, although later travellers reported that the stumps had not always been removed and the surviving physical evidence shows relatively few locations where the extant road conforms with the dimensions specified in the instructions. The Old Bathurst Road section of Cox's Road at Woodford is one of the most easily accessible, largely intact, and still clearly recognisable surviving sections of the 1814 road within the Blue Mountains. It extends for over a kilometre beside and overlapping with an unsurfaced local road along the top of the ridge. It can be accessed either from Hepburn Road or from Old Bathurst Road and Taylor Road, Woodford. The remains of the 1814 road are the central feature of the ridge-top landscape. They relate historically, physically, and visually to the undisturbed bush landscape to the east and to the various later transport and