Tasmania's easiest Great Short Walk - just 30 minutes from Deloraine

It is best showcased several hours in, from the track to Solomons Throne and Mount Jerusalem, after a night camped on the wooden platforms of Wild Dog Creek and providing no snow is forecast.

Alternatively, you could try this 10-minute pit stop in which you neither need to take one vertical step nor wander out of sight of your car.

It would be difficult to find a less demanding or better constructed excursion among Discover Tasmania's 60 Great Short Walks (detailed in booklets available from most tourism outlets), hence the first two scores in my primary school style marking system.

From lay-by alongside the Highland Lakes Road between Deloraine and Great Lake to viewing platform at the southern tip of picturesque Pine Lake, every step is along beautifully sweeping duckboards which wind through the walk's principal subjects in a futile bid to make the exercise vaguely demanding.

With the lake and Great Western Tiers providing willing backdrops, the trees themselves are incredibly photogenic, the model train set design making them appear too manufactured to be natural and explaining their popularity in ornamental European gardens.

Unique to Tasmania, pencil pines can reach ages greater than 1200 years which means some of these babies may have begun life when Danish Vikings were sailing up the Thames to sack London and Canterbury.

They are also generally restricted to sub-alpine areas above 800 metres (pencil pines that is, not Danish Vikings) hence options to study being limited to multiple-day hikes through the windswept wilderness, or this doddle of a waddle where you never once stray from a man-made platform.

Where: Pine Lake, on the A5 Highland Lakes Road, 33km south of Deloraine

Condition: 10/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Wildlife: 4/10

Scenery: 7/10

Summary: Minimal effort affords maximum exposure to iconic Tasmanian flora.