Luhrs Cottage Museum

Built of pug and straw around 1846, this tiny four-roomed cottage was the home of Johann Heinrich Luhrs, the first Lutheran schoolteacher at Light Pass, along with his wife Rosina and their five children. Today it is one of the Barossa's most evocative small museums, carefully restored and furnished in the style of the valley's earliest German settlers.

Every room rewards a slow look. The bedrooms display early German clothing and children's toys, the front room holds Luhrs family photographs and religious paintings, and the kitchen is crowded with the pots, crocks and implements of daily settler life - including the small fireplace that boiled water for the weekly bath. A schoolroom wing, added about twenty-three years after the original building, contains the large bake oven that once produced the family's bread and cakes.

Entry is by gold coin donation, which goes toward preserving the cottage. While you're in the village, walk a few minutes up the road to see one of the Barossa's great curiosities: the twin Lutheran churches of Strait Gate and Immanuel, standing barely two hundred metres apart. Together with the cottage, they make Light Pass one of the most rewarding small detours in the valley.