Shiny Bantry Bay

Rain and sunshine - and the sweep of Bantry Bay, one of Cape Town's affluent Atlantic suburbs. From 1803-1808 a botanical garden was established on the lower slopes of Lion's Head by Dr Friedrich Ludwig Liesching, a physician from Germany who practiced in Cape Town. (Funnily enough there seems to have been another botanic garden just around the corner in Tamboerskloof established by another German - the pharmacist Carl Ferdinand Heinrich von Ludwig - also known as Baron von Ludwig a little later in 1826 or so.) The bay was originally known as Botany Bay but by the 1920s the garden had vanished and it had morphed into Bantry Bay and no-one is really sure why. Two photos below, taken from roughly the same positions, show it sometime in the 1930s and in 1816. Ellerman House - a smart hotel today - can be seen in the new photo above (just below the crane in the centre) and in the old one below.
The two photos and the information in this post are from the book The Lion Mountain by Mona De Beer.

Imagining the past

As you leave Fish Hoek Beach you cross the railway line, and on your left is the South African Navy's "WO's, CPO's and PO's Mess". This is the site of Fish Hoek's original farm homestead that was built, it is thought, in the nineteenth century by one of the owners of the "Vischhoek loan place"or farm, a Thomas Palmer, who bought it in 1822 and then went insolvent, after which the farm was subdivided into three. Several subdivisions later it was bought by the formidable Hester de Villiers, who was the owner when this photo was taken in the early twentieth century. The scar made by the stone quarry (opened in 1896) in the hill above can be seen even to this day. Today, a hundred years later. The blue arrow marks the spot of the naval mess, hidden behind the ugly beach buildings.