Mountains to Governor Brisbane. Soon afterwards the surveyor-general John Oxley instructed his assistant-surveyor Robert Hoddle to survey Bell's line of road. Hoddle completed the task and his survey report was submitted in November 1823. The road across the mountains was soon afterwards cleared and formed by convict labour. Settlement In June 1829 in a published "List of Towns and Stations… published for general information" the following was included: "Tomah Mountain, on Bell’s Road to Bathurst" (in Northumberland county), 60 miles from Sydney. George M. C. Bowen, who had previously been a land commissioner and surveyor, was granted 2,560 acres (1,036 ha) in 1831 at Berambing near Mount Tomah, which he named 'Bulgamatta'. Bowen described Mount Tomah as “the highest and central elevation of the group which adjoined my land”. Bowen sold his landholding in 1836. The location of 'Bulgamatta' homestead was known as 'Old Tamah' in the mid-1950s and is now the location of the Chapel Hill Retreat (in Berambing Crescent). With the establishment of pastoral runs beyond Bathurst and Mudgee herds of sheep and cattle began to be driven along Bell’s Line of Road to the markets at Homebush. The road from Mount Tomah to the Hawkesbury floodplain was often precarious and difficult to travel along. The drovers in charge of stock "would be met at Mt. Tomah by a pilot, whose duty it was to see the travelling flocks and herds through to the lowland plain below Kurrajong". The road served as ‘Bell’s Live Stock Route’ for many years, “practically until the western railway undertook the work of transporting the stock to market” from the mid-1870s. The following description of Berambing was published in January 1861: "Berambing is between two and three miles from the summit of Mount Tomah, which is concealed by the intervening forest; but its elevation is considerable, and the climate is cool, bracing, and agreeable, and to those who can really appreciate nature there is a rich fund of enjoyment, and a field of research rendered doubly interesting from having been the scene of some of Allan Cunningham's botanical wanderings... Immediately bordering on Berambing the forest consists of peppermint, stringybark, grey gum, and mahogany. Recent rains had rendered the road muddy, and rather impeded our progress." Author of children's books and environmentalist, Hesba Fay Brinsmead, was born in Berambing in 1922 and her upbringing in the area inspired much of the background for her