Catching the Breeze - Adelaide Hills

Just half an hour’s drive along a freeway fitted with koala ladders over its central barrier takes me up to the viewpoint on grandiosely named Mt Lofty.

Its altitude is a scant 727m, but that’s high enough for a cooling breeze and a splendid view over the city’s Lego skyscrapers surrounded by a wide green border, and of the wooded hills behind me.

Here, tucked into secret valleys, I’m looking forward to a full day’s worth of little villages to explore, each with its own distinct personality.

Best-known is Hahndorf, its leafy main street lined with low stone gingerbread cottages and two-storey buildings with steeply-pitched, half-hipped roofs. Carved bargeboards give a Bavarian flavour to the quintessentially Australian iron-lace balconies below.

Settled in 1839 by Lutherans fleeing religious persecution back home in eastern Germany, the village’s main focus today is more the delights of the flesh: food, wine, coffee and shopping. I eat the biggest scone of my life – at Muggletons, with their home-made jam – under wooden beams fitted with a brass pulley system to convey the bill from one end of the shop to the other. Afterwards, I nose around the antiques and furnishings for sale.

A heritage trail along the street links original settlers’ cottages, pubs, museum and churches with plenty of arts and crafts in between for light relief; but, at the end of a winding track, I find some serious art.

The Cedars is the home and studio of Hans Heysen, the celebrated German painter, whose loving landscapes persuaded homesick immigrants to appreciate for the first time the beauty of Australian scenery.

His studio, tucked under gum trees, is light and cosy, a painting on the easel and canvases leaning against the wall, tubes of oils laid out ready. In the parlour I admire his still life of flowers and fruit over the mantelpiece: Ballerina Anna Pavlova offered him a blank cheque for the painting, but it had been a gift to his wife and nobly – or wisely – he refused to sell it.

Along the road Stirling, with its cricket ground ringed by oaks and chestnuts, stone pub and grand houses with their lovely gardens, looks authentically English. Bridgewater has a beautiful old stone flour mill, with a huge water wheel and a top-class restaurant and wine cellar inside.

Aldgate is postcard-pretty, Woodside has cheese and chocolate and, at the Beerenberg Strawberry Farm, the shop walls are lined with shiny glass pots of jams and chutneys. On my tour I’ve driven past cellar doors, breweries, the fabulous National Motor Museum at Birdwood, wildlife parks and walking trails; eventually, I come to my senses.

Those early settlers got it right: you don’t visit the Adelaide Hills for a day’s escape from the baking heat of the city. You stay there.