Behind Tumby Bay's famous blue water lies a band of rolling green hill country hiding a National Trust village, a perfect cove and the best farm views on the peninsula.
Everyone photographs Tumby Bay from the same angle: jetty, white sand, water so blue it looks colour-graded. Fair enough - but turn the camera around. Behind the town, the land rises into something most visitors never suspect the Eyre Peninsula owns: proper hills, green for half the year, folded with valleys that could pass for somewhere far wetter. The locals call it the hinterland. They mostly have it to themselves.
Up into the Koppio hills
The road inland climbs quickly into the Koppio hills, a band of high country running down the spine of the lower peninsula. In winter and spring it is startlingly green - wheat and barley on the slopes, sheep in the gullies, big skies overhead. The drive alone justifies the detour, but the hills hide a genuine destination at their heart.
The Koppio Smithy Museum began with one building: a blacksmith's shop and cottage built by Thomas Brennand in 1905 at the crossroads of the district. Over more than forty years, National Trust volunteers have grown it into an entire heritage village - an 1890 thatched cottage, the one-teacher Koppio school that ran from 1934 to 1970, a 1910 tailor's shop from Port Lincoln, reputedly the smallest post office in the state, and shed after shed of tractors, buggies, shearing gear and a famous barbed wire collection. It is the kind of museum where you plan an hour and lose three.
Wheat town interlude
Push deeper inland and the hills flatten into the grain country around Cummins, a working farm town with a classic pub and silos you can see from twenty minutes away. This is the engine room of the lower Eyre Peninsula - the wheat and sheep economy the Koppio museum preserves in amber is still running here, live and unsentimental.
Back to the water at Lipson
The hinterland loop earns its finale: drop back to the coast 15 km north of Tumby Bay, where a farm track ends at Lipson Cove - a tight crescent of white sand facing a small offshore island that has been a conservation park since 1967. Lipson Island shelters nesting cormorants, terns and one of Spencer Gulf's last stable little penguin colonies; at low tide a sand bar reaches toward it, and the cove behind is as good a swimming beach as the entire east coast offers. Campers with foresight book nothing, bring everything and stay days.
The full circuit
Done as a loop - coast, hills, wheat, cove - this is one of the great unsung half-days on the peninsula. Bookend it in town: the Tumby Bay murals in the morning light, then fish and chips on the jetty foreshore as the sun drops behind the hills you spent the day in. And if the jetty wins your heart, it has competition - we ranked it against its rivals in the best jetties on the Eyre Peninsula.
