Southern Lost City was a key motivator for our trip to Limmen National Park, as I said in the introductory post, and it didn’t disappoint us.
The rock formations are every bit as strange and beautiful as Karl’s photo promised, and the camping ground is only a short stroll from their feet. The early morning sun sets them alight in fiery orange, and the setting sun outlines them against the sky; in between, they are there to explore.
One of the few marked walking tracks in the park loops from the edge of the camping ground, along the face of the Lost City, up through a gap to the broad ridge behind it, along that ridge and back down through another gap. It’s supposed to take two hours but we stopped so often for views, plants and birds that we took three.
The view from the far side of the ridge hints at the process which produced the Lost City, since the matching plateau across the valley has a fringe of similar but smaller columns. In the beginning, it seems, there was a sandstone plateau, fissured in all directions by the forces which lifted it up; in time, the fissures became crevices, gullies and then narrow gorges, leaving the strongest parts standing as towers.
Understanding something of the origin of the Lost City doesn’t make it any less breathtaking – perhaps the reverse, if it helps us see the deep time that the towers embody.
Part of their impact comes from their scale. If you look carefully at the third of my images you will see a person in the deep shadow beside the column. It’s about eight metres tall, and many are taller.
Plants and wildlife
Orange grevilleas were in full flower around the camping ground and the honeyeaters and friarbirds (five or six species) were feasting on it. We also had a crow (which raided the food we left on the table), bowerbirds, wagtails, fantails, fairy wrens, and more (links will take you to my photos on iNaturalist).
Walking down the access road I noticed a little gully with what looked like large bullet-holes in its sandy walls: pardalote nests? Yes. A little patience was rewarded by sightings and (poor, because they’re tiny, fast and shy) photos.
Getting there
We came in to the park from the South so, as this fact sheet and park map (pdf) makes clear, we drove about 150 km (on gravel roads) through cattle country and the undeveloped southern section of the park from Cape Crawford to the SLC camping ground. See Practicalities for more about access.
The camping ground itself is fairly basic but generously laid out and reasonably shady. There’s no water (BYO!). We camped there for two nights but would have liked more.
• Introduction and index to Limmen (Mataranka, Nitmiluk, etc) blog posts August 2023.
I’ve been browsing books on Cambodia, hoping to be able to travel there in a few weeks. I was struck by the similarities of the shape of the towers in this photo of The Bayon, Cambodia in an old book, & the rock formations at Limmen NP. At the time we visited I was not convinced by the explanation of the name being that they resembled apartment blocks. I wonder when they were named, considering Angkor Wat was only rediscovered in 1860, & Europeans started establishing cattle properties in the Territory just a short time after that.
Idle speculation, but fun to think of these possibilities,
Thanks for that thought – it’s a good one!
We have both ‘Southern’ and ‘Western’ Lost Cities (I don’t know whether you got to the Western one when you were up that way) but I don’t know anything about which ‘Lost Cities’ the Europeans who named them might have had in mind.
Angkor Wat and the nearby temples are certainly very similar and may have been in the news at the right time when Europeans first settled in the area. The rediscovery of Angkor took a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat#European_rediscovery
I can easily imagine that Angkor Wat may have been the inspiration for the names of the rock formations. As an aside, while I was there we had a film crew from the UK remarking on how “unique” the Southern Lost City is. Given their job is travelling around the world filming in the most eye catching locations – I think that says volumes about the place.
I can’t say that I know for sure how the names came about, but a quick google [“lost city” site:https://nt.gov.au/parks/ ] will show you that “Lost City” is a reccurring theme in the Territory. So I’m going to put most of those names down to a lack of imagination.