The Corn Trail was an early bridle track linking the Southern Tablelands to the coastal valley of the Buckenbowra River, in New South Wales, Australia.
At the time, the new settlements on the Southern Tablelands had no direct connection to a coastal port and needed to use the long road to Sydney to obtain supplies and ship produce.
[5] The Corn Trail remained in use during the early years of the gold rush to the area round Braidwood, but quickly fell into disuse following the opening, in 1858, of the Clyde Road—later the Kings Highway—that connected the tablelands to the port of Nelligen on the Clyde River[3][6] The Corn Trail was used by the Clarke Brothers and the others of their gang of bushrangers, during the 1860s, when—as outlaws—they used lesser known routes to move around the district without detection.
[7] Long forgotten and overgrown, it was restored, as a project for the Australian Bicentennial celebrations, and reopened, as a walking track, on 30 April 1988.
[10][9] As it descends, the trail passes from high mountain ridges to deep valleys and from eucalypt forest to warm temperate rainforest.
The subsequent continuing closure of the walking track was to allow the surrounding forest and other vegetation to recover from the catastrophic impact of the Clyde Mountain bushfire.