DESPITE rain and cool weather at the weekend the Bothwell Bicentenary Festival was a great success with locals, visitors and those who once called Bothwell home marking the occasion.

The town was alive with music, heritage displays, spinning, chainsaw art and those dressed in period costume and a traditional bullock team re-enacting trips of a bygone era.

The organising committee succeeded in having a mix of guided and self-guided tours as well as workshops covering all aspects of the history of Bothwell, farming, fishing, golfing, blacksmithing and more. Guests were encouraged to embrace the romanticism of the 1820s period and dress the part which many did.

Two hundred years since it was first established, Bothwell now draws tourists to its preserved historical buildings, pastoral landscapes, trout fishing and the oldest golf course in the Southern Hemisphere, ‘Ratho’.