Lutheran Mission

Having explored the old mine Jimmy took me back down to the village for tea with Linda, who was by way of being the village historian. having been raised in a village, I naturally began to enquire about the people and the history and found another fascination tale. The village of Pniel was set up by three farmers around 1830, when the british Empire was outlawing slavery. The farm labourers were, at that time, all slaves and the farmers began to worry that the slaves, once free, would desert the farms and leave them without labour. Three farmers got together and set aside a piece of ground on which their slaves could build houses with the idea that this would make the slaves more inclined to stay and work on the farms as day labourers. The village was taken over by the Lutherans as a mission station, prospered. The residents built their own houses and their own reservoir and survived apartheid by more or less ignoring it, so, if you pay Pniel a visit, don't expect a shanty town.
Blogs are not the place for detailed history and the history of the old mine, for example, is in the sullatoberdalton.com website. The history of the silver mine itself being in     http://sullatoberdalton.com/?page_id=811&preview=true

Silver Mine

The old mine tunnels into the mountain at Pniel was into solid rock and two hundred and fifty years was aa solid as the day it had been working. Lady Anne Barnard had recorded that the mine never actually produced any silver but when the shareholders, who included the then Dutch East India governor of the Cape began to get annoyed, the operator, a chap called Muller, melted down a few Rix dollars and presented that as the production to keep them quiet.
Muller's assertion that there was silver in the Simonsberg was greeted with excitement as the Dutch East India Company was finding the gold and silver it owned growing scarce and the suppliers in the Dutch East Indies were not prepared to accept any alternative in the form of promissory notes or commodities.
 Jimmy, my guide, asked if it looked possible for there to have been silver and I told him there were many signs of quartz and that could mean there was precious metal in the area.
The old shaft was barricaded off but I could still see down it and there was a wooden ladder of uncertain age hanging there, which Jimmy said I could climb down to the lower level. I had only a hand torch and having tried tricks like that with a proper mining lamp and new chain ladders  and found they didn't reach far enough and I had to climb all the way back up, I declined.
The pictures show the tunnel, one of the crannies where the workers had placed a candle, the shaft and a bit of a dyke that didn't even look worth sampling.

www.sullatoberdalton.com

The Face of God

The Silver Mine I was looking for turned out to be above a village called Pniel, an old village set up by freed slaves in the early 1830's; Pniel translates to 'The Face of God'. I was lucky enough to find a lady called Linda who agreed to arrange for a guide to take me to the old mine.The old plan showed two level tunnels and a vertical shaft but from the village there was nothing to be seen, largely because the mine was in the Simonsberg that seems to hang over the village. My guide turned out to be Jimmy, who had worked in Falkirk and Canada and knew the site well. We climbed up the steep side of the mountain through a wonderful selection of Cape Fine Bos to the entrance to what seemed to be the main access level, where I could look out over the Dwars River Valley. Dwars is the Afrikaans for dry but this was winter and there was snow in the top of the far hills. The view made it a fine picnic spot used often by the villagers from Pniel.

www.sullatoberdalton.com

Lady Ann Barnard

While I was involved in the wine farms around Franschhoek and Stellenbosch I had been trying to find soe information about the silver mine mentioned by Lady Ann Barnard in her memoirs. Lady Ann was the wife of the first secretary to the British Consul to the Cape Colony and made a tour of the area, which is a compulsory reading for anyone interested in the area and its history. She mentioned a silver mine but not its precise location and it was only when looking through a history of Stellenbosch that I found a plan of the old mine and got sucked into a whirlpool of history.  I had thought the nature reserve at Silvermine had something to do with it but, no, this was something else - the first of the many mining scams to be generated in South Africa.
As the picture shows, we are going into the dark on a mountainside through a tunnel dug in 1740 five years before Bonny Prince Charlie landed in Scotland.

www.sullatoberdalton.com

Picnics at Delta Solms

At the end of the woodland at Solms Delta winery and museum, the Berg River runs over its brown stones in dappled sunshine creating an ideal picnic area. In the glade between the river and the dam. When I visited, Delta can cope with supplying picnics for up to ten parties in the summer months, an ideal spot to relax and unwind with friends and family. 

www.solms-delta.co.za