Cox's Road and Early Deviations - Linden, Linden Precinct is a heritage-listed former road and now fire trail and road at off Railway Parade, Linden, City of Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed and built by William Cox from 1814, with the assistance of a convict road party.. It is also known as Old Bathurst Road and Coxs Road. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 31 July 2015. History The road from Emu Ford to Bathurst, a distance of was completed in only six months during 1814 and 1815 by a working party composed mostly of convicts. Governor Lachlan Macquarie decided to have a carriage road constructed across the Blue Mountains, to the country which had been "newly discovered" by Europeans in 1813. The so called "First Crossing" of 1813 took place on the traditional lands of the Dharug, Gundungurra and Wiradjuri people. Other routes through the ridges and valleys of the Blue Mountains had been used by Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years. Cox was born in Wimborne Minster, Dorset in 1764. He married Rebecca Upjohn at Clerkenwell, London in 1789. Cox arrived in NSW on board the "Minerva" in January 1800. Cox became Chief Magistrate at Windsor in 1810 and in July 1814 Governor Macquarie made William Cox the Superintendent of the works for a new road over the Blue Mountains. His first wife died in 1819 and Cox married Anna Blachford in 1821. He died on 15 March 1837. Cox's road party reached the Linden area by late August 1814, and remained at Linden - Woodford until around mid-September 1814, by which time they had moved on to the present day vicinity of Hazelbrook. It was the first time they encountered the steep rocky platforms, and the ever-narrowing ridge. Cox's style of road-building was pragmatic and primitive. Confronted with rocky platforms and sharp drops, he generally had his men clear the flattest parts, removing an "immense quantity of rock" where necessary, and usually marking out the line with shallow chiselled gutters and utilising the rock platform as a pavement; where the road ran over the shallow soils, it was often marked out by rows or low walls of rough, broken stone. The road was cut past 'Caley's' cairn of stones, built, it was thought, to mark the end of an earlier unsuccessful attempt to cross the