Wool Bay Lime Kiln

On the cliff above the little jetty at Wool Bay stands a squat, round tower that puzzles most first-time visitors: the last of the lime kilns that once made this tiny port hum. The settlement was founded as Pickering in 1876 and only formally became Wool Bay in 1940, but it was lime, not wool, that defined it. By 1908 the firm of David Miller & Sons had three kilns burning on the clifftop, and added three more in 1910, along with a blacksmith's forge and a tramway running down to the jetty.

At their peak the kilns could turn out 280 bags of high-grade lime a week, carted along the tramway and loaded onto ketches bound for Adelaide. Wool Bay lime went into some of the city's finest buildings, including the Treasury and the public library. The rise of Portland cement in the 1920s slowly killed the trade; the kilns closed in the 1960s and most were demolished in the 1970s.

The surviving kiln, listed on the South Australian Heritage Register along with the Wool Bay Jetty in 1985, is free to wander around at any time. Combine it with a squid jig off the jetty below, or a stop at Stansbury just up the coast.