Today we’ve managed to uncover quite a stretch of the south side of the circular driveway that entered from Rathdowne Street and swept along both the north and the south side of the central circular garden, before coming to a nice location in front of the porchway. You can imagine the ladies and gentlemen in their carriages being driven along this driveway for the exhibition.
What we can see over here towards the southern fence is a curve of driveway bordered by a shallow curbing. And on the other side, on the south side of the curbing, you can see that the soil is brown, which suggests that is the remains of a garden bed, which we know was to the south side of the circular driveway.
And as we follow the sweep of the driveway around, going past the two old Araucaria trees, we can see that the curbing – broken up a little bit by the tree roots there – then starts to sweep back towards Rathdowne Street. That gives us some sense of the shape of the driveway, certainly as it was after 1890, perhaps also as it was for the 1880 exhibition.