Big Raspberry – Westerway

Westerway grows raspberries in old hop fields, and it has only been doing so since 1995.

That is the detail that makes this more interesting than a giant fruit beside a road. The Derwent Valley was hop country – the tall, trellised fields that supplied Australian brewing for well over a century, and which still shape the landscape and its heritage buildings. Raspberries were common throughout the valley forty years ago; the plantings at Westerway went into the old hop ground in 1995, which is to say the giant raspberry marks an agricultural transition, not an ancient tradition.