lay above the level of any anticipated flood. The elevated situation, however, paid the price of a steady slope. Geographers have assigned five types of slope to the parish of Wilberforce, varying from the level flood-plain along the river, through level uplands and "rolling" country to "rough" and "steep". The level uplands lie too far from the river farms to be a possible site for the town, but the penalty of being closer to the flood-plain was that most of the town was built on a slope of the second steepest category. No other Macquarie town is built on such a pronounced hillside. The surveyor, James Meehan started his work of laying out Wilberforce on 5 January 1811 in a perfect symmetry of three rows, each containing five sections. The Great Square occupied the whole central rectangular section. When Governor Macquarie returned to the town on 11 January 1811, "the name (Wilberforce) being painted on a board was nailed on a high post and erected in the middle of the large square in presence of a great number of the most respectable settlers in this district". The Square was defined by the new town streets, Macquarie to the north, George to the south and, on the short sides of the rectangle, Duke to the west and Church to the east. These new roads did not supersede the older track from the flood-plain up to the road to Kurrajong, which wound across the eastern sector of the new Square. Houses were built which encroached on George Road opposite the Square and the schoolmaster's house of the 1830s came very close to encroaching on the Square itself. Church Road had no building development at all until the very end of the nineteenth century, but the two allotments in Duke Road adjacent to the Square had been developed. On the land above the Square across Macquarie Road, the second Macquarie schoolhouse/chapel, built in 1819, dominated the scene until Edmund Blacket erected St John's Anglican Church in front of the Macquarie building in 1860. Bishop William Broughton had in 1849 attempted to have the proposed new church built in the middle of the Square instead, and he had some local support, but this development was not approved. Wilberforce Square, in contrast to Richmond Park, was not designated as a market place. The pronounced slope made it unsuitable for team-games, such as cricket, which were