History / Archaeology

The Rensburg Spruit is the river cascading past SEWULA and it joins the Bushman’s River, which rises in the Giant’s Castle area of the Drakensberg, and in whose catchment there have been rich palaeontological, archaeological and historical research done. That includes fossils, early human arrivals such as the stone-age SAN (Bushmen), iron-age man, later migrations of the Bantu-speaking and Afrikaans speaking pastoralists and agriculturalists and then globalisation with the British Empire and industrialisation, are all part of the SEWULA historical tapestry. People have slept at Sewula for a 1000 years.

The good water supply, the abrupt transition from grassveld to thornveld and the security of the rocky hills, made the area a natural place for human settlement. There is the 14th Century iron-age ‘fortified hill site’, the Rensburg Koppie National Monument recording the 1838 Zulu/Voortrekker clash, the stone remains of the ‘staging post’ on what was the old ‘N3’ where the post carts and other transport would change their mules or horses to speed up their journeys between the Coast and the interior, the Anglo-Boer War defensive positions to protect Estcourt against Boer incursions.

All of these events can be inspected on foot and the longest walk is the thirty minutes to the Anglo-Boer War positions.

Marthinus Oosthuysen from the 1838 Voortrekker/Zulu clash as depicted on the carved marble frieze in the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.