BLOCKHOUSE MONUMENT, DARLING, WESTERN CAPE

摘要

My attention was drawn to this interesting structure by Colyn Brookes, who sent me photographs (although I should have picked up on it earlier, as I find it is briefly mentioned in Tony Westby-Nunn's A tourist guide to the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902, published in 2000!) I was in the area in June 2007, so decided to visit the structure, which is situated in the new town cemetery along the R315 road from Yzerfontein. The blockhouse is built to the three-storey 'Standard Pattern' to approximately half-scale, the walls being of 'Smart Stone' or similar reconstituted stone, the loophole plates of wood, the machicouli galleries clad in flat asbestos-cement and the roof of timber covered in corrugated iron.