Rickety Bridge and Stoney Brook

What income they did have, and any money they could scrape together, the McNaughts spent on improving the farm’s production capability. Their first step being to uproot the pear trees and plant vines.

Joy, with her three children, moved onto the farm, leaving Nigel doctoring to pay the bills, and started to learn to make wine. Her experiences are recorded in the book she has written – Headlong into the Red. She tells of how she called Nigel in tears to say she was resigning . Nigel’s reply was that she wasn’t allowed to resign, that he had a consulting room full of patients and she’d better just get on with things.

Having met Nigel in Joy’s company, this repost is a reflection of the financial strain rather than their close relationship. 

Heesom had for some time been at Zorgvleit and the Sanddrift manor house – now renamed Rickety Bridge, had again fallen into less than perfect condition. Joy tells of lying in bed one night and wakening to find she could see the stars through a hole where the roof thatch had blown off.

Some of the McNaught’s hard earned money was spent on improving the labourer’s cottages, unfortunately not to a standard Joy would have considered acceptable but to the absolute limit of what money was available.

www.ricketybridge.com

Rickety Bridge sits near Franschhoek, the area of the Cape Colony set aside by the Dutch to accommodate the immigrant Huguenots, when Franch rescinded the Treaty of Nantes, which had given the protestant Huguenots the right to worship in their own way. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, a family called Peppler amalgamated their wine farm holdings into one unit called simply 'A piece of ground', part of which was to become Rickety Bridge.

For the Pepplers, it was a judicious move. At that time, in Europe, wine had reached the stage of a necessity. The water in rivers stank with raw sewerage and the growing industrial waste, (falling into the Thames was a death sentence, not because few people could swim, but from swallowing the stinking poisoned water).

Napoleon had closed the ports to export to anywhere British. Britain had added to the blockade the sanction of high import tariff - with a preferential one for South Africa. The supply of French and continental wine had, through all this, shrunk to what could be smuggled or slipped past the blockade by the Americans or other neutrals, and sales of South African wine boomed on a worldwide basis. At the turn of the century the price had been 60 Rix dollars for a 160 gallon leaguer, but, by Waterloo in 1815, it had risen as high as 180 Rix dollars for good wine, a threefold increase.  

www.sullatoberdalton.com/books