Most visitors enter the Barossa from the south-west and never see Mount Pleasant. They're missing a proper country town with one of the region's best markets.
Every region has an edge that the brochures forget. For the Barossa it is the high southern country around Mount Pleasant, where the valley's vines give way to grazing land, eucalypt woodland and the first folds of the Adelaide Hills. Come in this way once and you may never enter by the main road again.
Three towns in a trench coat
Mount Pleasant, about 55 kilometres east-north-east of Adelaide, is technically three settlements - Totness, Talunga and Hendryton - that grew together into one town. The names survive on the maps and on two of the town's best assets: its showgrounds and its bush reserve.
Saturday morning, done properly
The town's beating heart is the Saturday market. Since 2012, the pavilion at Talunga Recreation Park has filled each week with the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market - growers and producers from the surrounding hills selling vegetables picked that morning, pasture eggs, bread, smallgoods and cakes that do not survive the drive home. It runs 8am to midday, and unlike some celebrated markets, this one still feels like it belongs to the locals queuing alongside you.
Make a morning of it: coffee and provisions at the market, then twenty minutes of digestion on the lawns before a walk.
Walks without crowds
On the town's western edge, Totness Recreation Park offers exactly the kind of unglamorous, lovely walking that never makes a top-ten list - an easy 1.2-kilometre loop around the northern dam, and a more rugged 2.6-kilometre circuit through woodland in the southern block. Waterbirds after rain, wattle in late winter, and a reasonable chance of having it entirely to yourself.
The tree that raised a family
Ten minutes north at Springton stands one of the strangest monuments to settler grit anywhere in Australia: the Herbig Family Tree, a vast hollow red gum in which Friedrich Herbig, his wife Caroline and the first of their children actually lived in the late 1850s before graduating to a cottage. The family eventually numbered sixteen children; the tree, remarkably, still stands.
Onwards and upwards
From Mount Pleasant the road north climbs into Eden Valley riesling country, and the loop through Springton and Eden Valley to Angaston is one of the prettiest drives in the region. Treat Mount Pleasant as a gateway and you'll see it once; treat it as a destination and it will quietly become a habit. For more of the region's small-town charms, see our guide to the best Barossa villages and towns.
