History Webs

For the Drakenstein Valley

Reference

The Romance of Cape mountain passes, Graham Ross, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town, 2002.

Culverts

Masons carved huge stone blocks to buld culverts under the road's retaining walls.

Gawie se Water

In 1880 Gawie Retief built a furrow - today referred to as "Gawie se Water" -to channel water from the Witterivier across the watershed into the Kromrivier to provide irrigation water to the his fellow Bovlei farmers.

Convict labour

The legend of Scotty Smith, said to be one of the convicts working on the pass, still endures. Yet by all accounts he never exsisted. Read more about the use of convict labour during the construction of the pass.

Bainskloof Pass - completed 1853

In the 1840s Andrew Geddes Bain was working on the Michell’s Pass, when he began to contemplate a pass through the Wellington’s mountains. At the time there was only a bridal path through the mountains.
    He asked Johannes Retief to act as his guide through the mountains. Other members of the group were the sons of Daniel Malan and Septimus du Toit. Horses were provided by Field Cornet Rousseau. They followed a cattle track, then left their horses at the neck (now Bainskloof village or Eerste Tol), and then walked eastwards down into the kloof.
    Bain described the landscape as “repulsive and savagely grand” and “for the first three miles we had nothing but crossing and recrossing the river and climbing up the mural banks at the risks of our necks, so gloomy was this place, there is a perfect absence of animal life.”
    Bain completed the Michell Pass in 1848 and moved his team to Wellington where he built a construction village at Eerste Tol. The settlement included the usual storerooms and workshops, as well as a hospital, a church/school building, recreation area and stables.
Work started in February 1849 on the easier western approach. This section required little blasting, and two timber bridges and four stone culverts. He also had 300 oaks planted for shade.
    He also tried to shorted this part of the route by building a 122m tunnel, but the rock face soon proved too unstable and dangerous.
In 1851 he moved his camp to Tweede Tol to start work on the remaining, more difficult part of the pass.
    Ten kilometre of road had to be blasted through solid rock, and in places 20m high retaining walls had to be built.
    The workers used little more than hand drills, sledge hammers, steel bars, picks and shovels.
    Most of the work was done by convict labour - between 300 and 350 people at a time. Sometimes the figure went up to 450. About 1,000 convicts could claim that they were involved in building the 30 km pass.
The pass was opened in September 1853 and is still in use today - with a few minor improvements like getting a tarred surface in 1934. It became a national monument in 1980.