STONE WALLS

I hope none of my readers have ever been stonewalled by someone who has persistently refused to communicate with you or even to express an emotion of any sort in your presence. I am told that this is called ‘unfriending’ these days. How awful!

Moving towards the literal interpretation of stone walls, I have a few local historical stone walls to show you. Here is a rough stone wall made of seemingly random rubble that was built in Port Alfred. As the stones are not of a uniform size or shape, they have been carefully arranged in order to distribute pressure over the maximum area whilst avoiding long vertical joints. The gaps appear to have been filled with what looks like a mixture of gravel and cement. This wall is all that remains of  the original fort in Port Alfred and is now incorporated as the boundary wall of a private home in Hards Street.

This dry stone wall at the Clay Pits in the Coombs area appears to have been begun with largely dressed stone, while the top layer consists of a loose collection of stones that may have been available in the immediate area. It is the only wall remaining of the original fortification at that site.

Much more sturdily built is the stone wall of the powder magazine in Bathurst. Made from local stone sorted into size with some roughly hewn ones in between. It was built in 1821.

This stone wall is part of the fortified farm at Barville Park, complete with loop holes. It consists of an interesting collection of local stones filled with cement. The grey vertical lines indicate where cracks have been filled with modern cement. In his poem, Mending Wall, Robert Frost explains that:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Several farms in the Eastern Cape, as well as in the Karoo National Park (where this photograph was taken) use a collection of rounded boulders loosely piled together as a buffer against potential soil erosion.

The Governor’s Kop signal tower was built in 1843 as part of a series of signal towers that relayed messages via semaphore from Fort Selwyn in Grahamstown via Governor’s Kop to Fraser’s Camp and so on to Fort Peddie and Fort Beaufort. It illustrates a far more sophisticated method of building stone walls. These stones have been built to course, shown by their straight beds and sides which have been levelled up to form courses of varying depth.

GREEN GREEN II

The Christy Minstrels sang:

Green, green, it’s green they say

On the far side of the hill

Green, green, I’m goin’ away

To where the grass is greener still

I have spent several weeks of this year looking at the far side of the hill, catching up with family in Norway, where the green hills, trees and grass are such a striking contrast to the more sombre colours we are used to. Here is a Norwegian house we passed on one of our trips in that country:

Then there was this amazing crop of courgettes picked in a UK garden:

Once home in South Africa, I appreciate the green bark of fever trees (Vachellia xanthophloea) with their characteristic, almost luminous, lime green to greenish-yellow bark. While these trees are familiar to me from my youth spent in the Lowveld region, they have become popular trees to plant in public gardens and parking lots all over the country. Rudyard Kipling has one of his characters in The Elephant’s Child, tell the Elephant’s Child where he must go in order to find out what the Crocodile eats for dinner as: Then Kolokolo Bird said, with a mournful cry, ‘Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.’

It is good to return after a two-week sojourn in the Western Cape to see the aloes in our garden growing well, their spiky leaves swelling with maturity:

Even though the String of Pearls succulent (Curio rowleyanus) – a gift from a friend – is relatively drought tolerant, it is a relief to note that it is thriving despite my neglect:

An even greater surprise – and relief – is to find that over 65mm rain fell during our absence. There were still droplets on the nasturtium leaves:

MY TOWN

… through the lens of my cellphone camera. I am not often a passenger, so here is a quick whip through my town yesterday. We start with the Frontier Country Hotel in Beaufort Street:

This street has two lanes, each of which is wide enough to turn a wagon pulled by a full span of oxen. Opposite the hotel is this example of original architecture of Grahamstown:

We will take a closer look at the building at the end of the street before we turn left into High Street. Birch’s supplies school uniforms as well as academic robes and robes for  legal, municipal and clerical fraternities.

Here is a view of historical buildings lining one side of High Street:

It is a section of what was known as the Bon Marche building dating back from the 1880s. Just beyond the cars parked there is this beautiful building:

The next building houses the clothing chain, Truworths, on the ground floor:

Travelling up High Street towards Rhodes University, we pass one of the banks housed in an historical building:

A little further on is the High Court:

Travelling down Somerset Street, we pass the Fine Art Department of Rhodes University:

We then pass St. Andrew’s College, one of the private schools in town, before travelling up Cradock Road to reach our home:

HOLIDAY BUILDINGS

Let me be clear from the start that when we go on holiday, our default accommodation is camping. We enjoy the freedom of camping along with the inherent possibilities of meeting fellow campers and being able to closely observe the bird-life especially. There are other possibilities though. While I have never stayed at the Champagne Castle Hotel in the Natal Drakensberg, I have enjoyed walking around their beautiful gardens. This is a distant view of the hotel from one of the small dams in its large grounds.

There are a number of holiday cottages nearby and we were privileged once to share one with friends. It had a magnificent view of Cathkin Peak from its veranda.

The chalets in the Mountain Zebra National Park come in a variety of sizes. On a few occasions we have stayed in one – again in the company of family or friends.

I assure you that the outdoor furniture provided here is very heavy indeed. Nonetheless, this open area proved to be an excellent place from which to watch birds.

On one trip through the Eastern Cape, we stopped in to visit the campus of the University of Fort Hare, where I was struck by this mural outside their Department of Fine Arts.

If you are anything like us, a visit to local museums are a must whenever we travel through towns in this country. This is Fort Durnford, the former frontier post built in 1875 to protect the townspeople of Estcourt (in KwaZulu-Natal) from attacks by Zulus. It is now a very interesting museum. Note the beautiful dressed stone.

An interesting museum in my own town is Amazwi, which began life as the National English Literature Museum (NELM) and has since become more inclusive of housing archival material in a variety of languages.

GARGOYLES

Gargoyle … don’t you think that is a lovely sounding word? Similar to gargle you might say. All that gurgling and spluttering … which brings gullet to mind. These words all have something in common. Most gargoyles are shaped in the form of monsters, laughing or scowling humans, dragons, or demons. A distinctive feature of Gothic architecture, many gargoyles have troughs cut into their backs to catch rain water and  spouts that direct water away from the sides of buildings. This prevents rainwater from running down the stone walls and eroding the mortar that holds them together.

According to Oxford Languages, gargoyle comes from Middle English, which is derived from the Old French gargouille, meaning ‘throat or gullet’; also ‘gargoyle’ (because of the water passing through the throat and mouth of the figure); and is in turn related to the Greek gargarizein  which means ‘to gargle’ (imitating the sounds made in the throat). There we have it, this lovely sounding word is actually onomatopoeic because it resembles the gurgling sound of the water as it passes through the gargoyle and out its mouth.

Gargoyles became less common after the eighteenth century, once more modern drainpipes were developed. This one – on the Cathedral Church of St. Michael and All Angels in the Eastern Cape town of Queenstown (now called Komani) – has clearly been made superfluous thanks to the modern guttering.