Bannockburn Sluicings with their towering cliffs and deep ravines create a stark landscape that offers a dramatic illustration of the results of hydraulic sluicing and provides evidence of gold miners’ workings from the 1870s through until the early twentieth century. This is one of the best examples of hydraulic workings in Otago.

On the river terrace overlooking the Kawarau River, approximately a square kilometre of river terrace has been sluiced away to allow miners to get to the gold-bearing gravels lying beneath. Miners used both ground-sluicing and hydraulic sluicing technologies, as well as some tunnelling. Ground sluicing involves directing the flow of ground water over the ground miners want to wash away, using a water race. In hydraulic sluicing, miners direct water under high pressure through a nozzle at the sluice face. In each case, the gold is caught in a tray as the sluiced material is passed through a riffle box or similar. A tail race that leads away from the sluice face carries waste material away, except for heavy stones which are stacked into tailings.

The Bannockburn Sluicings comprise an extensive area of sluiced waste land, covered with heaps of tailings, and with tailings-filled gullies around the margins. The head races, fed from Menzies Dam, above, lead out to the tops of the gullies. The sides of the gullies are the sluice faces that were left when mining ended, and the floors of the gullies contain tail races and carefully stacked stone tailings. Some of the gullies have tunnels where the miners tried to get at pay dirt more quickly than by sluicing. The water races that fed the sluicings reach out into the landscape up into the Carrick Range.

The land was included in the Bannockburn Sluicings Historic Reserve gazetted in 2000. In 2015, the Bannockburn Sluicings remain part of the Otago Goldfields Park, and a well signposted walk through them takes about 1.5 hours and includes the related sites - Menzies Dam (Record No. 5611) and Stewart Town (Record No. 5610).