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.

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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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Having put down my notes of interviews from Vernon and his naval experiences from clipper ships to sinking Bismark and being sunk by Japanese bombers, I must get back to my other journalistic notes. I'm in the last stages of editing a book of short stories and that made me wonder if I could turn the notes on Vernon, the 1740 silver mining scam and the Cape Corps in East Africa in 1915 into a kind of series. Not short stories exactly but maybe three books in one. Something to think about anyway.

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