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The Bishop Trail is a tribute to the Bishop of Singapore,
Reverend C.J Ferguson-Davie, who was the first to
discover that ‘within the five miles of the
Tras-Kuala Kubu trunk road, on the border of Pahang
and Selangor, there was an area which seemed eminently
suitable for a hill station and which can rapidly
and cheaply developed’.
The discovery of the hill station was actually by
a freak chance. The Bishop and a friend, Reverend
A.B Champion, the Chaplain of Selangor, went on a
holiday ramble in the hills east of Hulu Selangor,
in November 1917 and at the same time to look for
another friend, Louis James Fraser, a Scottish adventurer
and ex-accountant, who was living in the area and
making a living out of buying crude tin ore from the
Chinese and Malay laborers who were fossicking the
ravines of the Sempam and Liang rivers and Repas and
Perting rivers in Ban Untung (now Bentong). |
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of the significant increase in the European population
in the East and their popular later became Fraser’s
Hill, the Federal Council of the Federated Malay States
in 1921, gratefully gave the Bishop a piece of land
below the junction of Lady Maxwell Road and Ledegham
Road, free from the usual premiums. And endorsement
to this effect was recorded in the title deed. He
built a two-storey cottage and called it ‘The
Retreat’. In 1930, when the Superintendent’s
Office of Fraser’s Hill acquired the cottage
upon the demise of the Bishop in Scotland, it was
renamed ‘The Bishop’s House’. This
little cottage which faces the distant mountains of
Jeriau is now dilapidated and uninhabitable and the
last tenant was the Ministry of Defence, Malaysia.
In the early days,
before the asphalt roads were built, the only communication
was by jungle trails. In 1921, just four years before
the Walsh brothers were awarded the contract to construct
the Raub-Kuala Kubu trunk road, the Bishop opened
a trail, now known as the Bishop trail, connecting
his residence, The Retreat, to the neighboring Cicely
bungalow and Muar Cottage and another (now part of
Lady Maxwell Road) to connect the Hemmant Trail, which
he used to get to the town centre or ‘The Hamlet’
for evening beers at The Tavern (now called ‘The
Spices’ specializing in Western food and Indian
curries) or at the Maxwell arms (now part of the garden
in front of the Sports Complex) which was run by the
head-boy of Sir George Maxwell.
Today, this
two kilometer trail is a haven for nature lovers and
bird-watchers. Located in a secluded part of Fraser’s
Hill and quite away from the town centre, the trail
is a ‘sanctuary’ to several species of
exotic birds, some of which are so rare that they
are not found elsewhere. However, during rainy seasons,
the trail is very slippery and infested with blood-sucking
leeches.
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