Please bring your own pen to sign logbook!
Karwyderskraal is a cultural landscape with an agricultural history. One of the joys of local history is finding out about local “characters”, who stand out from their contemporaries by virtue of physical appearance, dress, habits, occupation or social activities. Hermanus has several “characters”, one of the most interesting of whom is a lady known at the time as “Ella Gordon”. However, her full name was Isabella Gordon Dove Colston and she lived from 1873 to 1958, residing in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, Karwyderskraal and Voelklip from about 1902 till her death in 1958. Its significance lies in the period in which Ella Gordon owned the farm bequeathed to the Moravian Church who continue to own it. Ella Gordon built her house herself in a very individualistic style. She decorated walls, shutters and self-made furniture with paintings, which are still visible. She built a school and a church and some more dwellings with and for her labourers around her own house and created a healthy community life on her farm. Ella Gordon always had horses which she trained as ‘trick-horses’. She taught the horses many tricks. They could step out in time to music and Ella rode and trained her horses every day. Her white horse, Boysums could do many tricks, dance to music and his headstone in the horse cemetery reads: Boysums, the Wonder Horse. We shall meet to part no more. R.I.P. When the horses died they were given a specially devised, formal funeral and then buried in her specially constructed horse-graveyard. Every horse had a tombstone. Her horse graveyard is the only one of its kind in South Africa.
PLEASE NOTE : Only available between 7:30 and 17:30