The Ross Female Factory is a quiet but important convict site just off the village centre. It began as a station for chain gangs working on the bridge and road, then operated from 1847 to 1854 as a probation station for transported women and their babies.
Only fragments remain, but the site is well interpreted and worth the short walk. It gives Ross a harder history than the pretty sandstone village first suggests: punishment, domestic labour, infant deaths, and the lives of women who were moved around the colony as workers rather than treated as settlers.