Sandstone Delight: Castlecrag

This next suburb turned out to be more interesting than expected, at least for a residential suburb nestled in the trees of the North Shore.

Castlecrag

My bus ride from Willoughby took me directly to this suburb's outskirts, which is also coincidentally the suburb's commercial district.

As you might expect for a North Shore suburb you've never heard of, the commercial centre here is more of a "community shops" affair rather than anything else, with a couple of restaurants and boutique shops,

and the Quadrangle Shopping Village, a small shopping centre with tuk tuk parking.

Just past the shops, I found this bust of Walter Burley Griffin, a fellow who I'd just run into back in Willoughby. It turns out that Griffin, alongside his wife Marion Mahony Griffin, designed the suburb of Castlecrag, hence the bust. Curiously, I didn't see anything about his missus.

I left the suburb's nosebleedingly exciting CBD and started on residential Castlecrag.

Among the foliage heavy suburb, here I saw two housing options. The first option: shiny, wealthy, but not obscene.

The second? Sandstonetopia.

The more inventive have combined the two.

Castlecrag's bushland is also celebrated, with small plaques dotted around the place.

There appears to be some sort of route that you can take to learn about the local trees using these QR codes. Because nobody ever scans QR codes, I don't know what happens if you look these up, but I appreciate the effort.

Now it may not look it, but Castlecrag is actually a waterside suburb. My goal was to head to what appears to be the only point that the public can get to Castlecrag's shores on Sailors Bay (part of Middle Harbour). To do that, I turned past this piece of art engulfed in trees,

and headed deeper into the suburb.

On this journey, I met some more fancy houses,

this utterly confusing sign (well, if you don't realise that those are all street names),

and a few houses with windows in their roofs,

as well as this sign warning to look out for skydivers.

It was at this stage that the dilemma of getting to the water presented itself. You see, Castlecrag is a suburb at altitude.

The water, by definition, is not.

The end result was that in order to get to the shores, I had to walk down a slightly precarious winding road, hoping that an overzealous driver wouldn't come by.

Clearly, Walter and Marion didn't think this would be a problem, with a few little respite spots along the way.

Soon, the trees began to open up to views of the water.

Somewhat ironically, the best views were had not at the bottom, but on the road down. It turns out that Sailors Bay is an attractive place.

At the bottom is a marina without anything to offer the casual visitor.

Naturally, all that was left was to turn around and start on the journey uphill.

Once the winding road subsided, the uphill trek continued,

taking me past more sandstone,

and fancy homes.

Eventually, I found myself here.

What does escarpment mean? I don't know. What I do know is that it's a small piece of bushland,

leading to a clearing,

and a hell of a view.

I made it back to the road after only catching a single spiderweb to the face.

Continuing on, I was reminded of a real estate saying recommending buying "the worst house on the best street". As a millennial, I have no business buying anything, but I still thought this made for a nice shot.

Further up the street,

I met somebody bullying a tree.

I suspect this beautifully flowering one was the bully.

The trees led to my final point of interest in Castlecrag, my bus stop out of the suburb.

This bus stop has the honour of being the least frequent bus of my entire blog, running a total of five entire services on Saturday, and none on Sunday.