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.

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