The Manly to Spit Bridge Walkway is a great way to peek at some of Sydney's incredible real estate close up. It also gives you a sense of how the harbour must have been before European settlers decided it was an incredible piece of real estate.

The walk is broken up - on the Manly Council map at least - into six 20- to 40-minute sections. The first, the Fairlight walk ("1.6km. 30 mins. Gentle") and the North Harbour walk ("2.0km. 40 mins. Easy"), underlines why Sydney's holy grail is a place on the water.

Then you hit the bush and you discover that we all already own one, if we just take the trouble to amble along this nine-kilometre harbourside path and the others like it.

The leafy part of the walk starts after the low-tide short cut you can take across the beach at the village of North Harbour (as Balgowlah reserve was known when it was established in 1828). Then it's around the corner to Forty Baskets Beach.

This isn't, as it turns out, a jealous jibe at the householders who have managed to get their hands on a home here (harbour views and a national park), but was the number of baskets of fish dispatched across the water to North Head in 1885 to a contingent of Sudan troops at the Quarantine Station.

The next bay, once into the Sydney Harbour National Park, is Reef Beach, formerly a nudist shore, and a great place for a swim. But pack your cossie; these days a sly skinny dip can leave you $500 poorer. Still, there's ample natural glory beyond Reef Beach where you can get a real feel for what Sydney Harbour was like before word got out that it wasn't a bad place to build a home.Here, sheoak heath casuarinas dominate and the track pushes through the scrub in a head-high corridor to a series of sandstone outcrops that skirt Tania Park, named after Miss Australia 1961, Tania Verstak. Tania Park is also popular with kite freaks on blustery days. Below it is Crater Cove, where a handful of shacks remain that were built by fishermen and squatters and occupied until the 1970s. An Australian flag still flies atop the settlement, although these days the shacks are maintained by the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

From here the winding dirt track, quite steep in parts, heads down through groves of red gums and patches of subtropical vegetation. A one-kilometre (return) diversion to Grotto Point lighthouse takes you to the site of a First Fleet survey camp in January 1788.

Leaving the Clontarf track ("1.3km. 40 mins. Hard") at Castle Rock Beach, you continue through the bush, around Clontarf Point and on to Clontarf Beach. Beyond the beach is Clontarf picnic ground where Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, was shot on March 12, 1868. The prince wasn't seriously injured, saved by the thickness of his trouser braces. His would-be assassin, Henry O'Farrell, wasn't quite so fortunate and was hanged at Darlinghurst jail the next month.

From Clontarf the track skirts Sandy Bay and Fisher Bay, through more remnants of the sort of sub-tropical vegetation that would have once hugged most of Sydney Harbour's damp, sheltered gullies. Then 21/2 hours after you set off, it's on to the last remaining few hundred metres to the Spit Bridge and the return trip back to Manly (a short ride by taxi or 143 or 144 bus).
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