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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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Franschhoek, the area of the Cape Colony set aside by the Dutch to accommodate the immigrant Huguenots, when Franch rescinded the Treaty of Nantes, which had given the protestant Huguenots the right to worship in their own way.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.  

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There it is, a tractor museum, a canon from the Napoleonic wars and a wine farm all on Hooggelegen. Just let me add this last item. When I was there Ryk de Wit was trying to organise a stipr of land some 12 miles long as a nature ramble and conservation area but was having difficulty convincing his neighbours that they should all participate. His idea was that it would not just be a ramble but a corridor along which small mammals could travel and maintain the health of the gene pool. As well as this and the views from the top of the mountain there are more species of flora in the Western Cape than in the whole of the UK.
On the top of the rocks in front of the trees, one of the dassies is sitting. Unfortunately, the image won't magnify to show it properly.

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