Over the hills and far away

One might be excused for thinking an village built by the slaves in 1830 would be a bit of a shanty town with inward looking people but the slave ancestors of Pniel were business rivals of the Dutch East India company, sent to the Cape as punishment for opposing the conditions the DEA company insisted upon. They were, in many cases, aristocratic successful business people in their own land of the Spice Islands. Far from being insular, one 'Auntie' had visited relations in Australia, another in New Zealand and even one in Tighnabruaich in the Western Highlands of Scotland. Whether the later's relationship started when the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders went to the Cape during the Napoleonic War, or at some later date when the Seaforths were there, I never found out. The picture is looking over Pniel into the valley in which it rests, Boschendal is on the left beyond the fields.

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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.

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