A highway with a thousand stories – from convicts to farmers, bushrangers, villains, writers and painters. Cross a landscape first cleared by Aborigines for hunting and quickly settled by European farmers. Explore picture-perfect Georgian villages that began life as overnight stops for horse-drawn carriages. Look out for whimsical hedge shapes, 19th Century sandstone road markers, the ghoulish faces on the Ross Bridge, and gracious colonial homesteads. The Heritage Highway links the northern city of Launceston to the capital of Hobart and the first Europeans to use the route, in 1807, took eight days to make the journey.