Bain's Passes

Ecca Pass (Queen's Road)

AndrewDocumented

Engaged to build a military road under the Royal Engineers; his first pass in the Eastern Cape. Later returned to repair it.

R67Route
4.9 kmLength
520 mSummit
TarSurface

See it on the mapLog your drive

Before you go

Tarred pass on R67; winding road, exercise caution around heavy transport trucks.

Road conditions change with weather, floods, fires and roadworks. Check the latest conditions with the road authority or local tourism office before you leave, and carry offline maps.

About this pass

The Ecca Pass is the best-known mountain section of the Queen's Road, about 15 km north of Makhanda on the R67. Bain lived on the Ecca Heights from 1837 to 1840 while he worked on it. While cutting the road he studied the exposed rock and worked out the layers of what is now called the Karoo System. He named the blue shales and mudstones at the foot of the pass, about 250 million years old, the Ecca Group after the Ecca River, and found fossil reptiles in the cuttings. The name Ecca is said to come from a Khoi word for a salty or brackish river.

The Ecca Nature Reserve (proclaimed 1985) protects one of the few conserved patches of Albany thicket, a dense, spiny shrubland of spekboom, aloes (mostly flowering in winter), prickly euphorbias, crane flowers and gazanias. The reserve's trails were once marked but are now hard to find, and it relies on volunteers. A bronze plaque on a cairn at the top, put up in 1964 by the Historical Monuments Commission to honour Bain, was reported in 2022 to have been removed by vandals. The road beside the pass carried all traffic between Makhanda and Fort Beaufort until 1962. Ross's chronology: the Queen's Road was the military road from Grahamstown down the Ecca valley, across the Fish River and via the Ecca Pass to Fort Beaufort and on to Blinkwater and the foot of the Katberg, built 1837–45. Bond (1956) describes the labour as former Khoikhoi soldiers of the Cape Corps, who worked for five years under Bain's direction, and says nothing like these seventy miles of metalled highway (cut from mountainsides, raised on embankments, carried over rivers by bridges) had been seen in South Africa. Bain had the advice of Major Selwyn and his Royal Engineers. A cairn on the heights of the pass, 16 km from Grahamstown, honours him (bronze plaque 1964).

History

Built by
Engaged to build a military road under the Royal Engineers; his first pass in the Eastern Cape. Later returned to repair it.
Built
1837; 1837–1842 for the Queen's Road works.
Location
R67, Makhanda (Grahamstown) to Fort Beaufort, Eastern Cape
Later work
Repaired.Bain himself returned to repair it before starting Katberg; year not given.
Notes
The Ecca Group of rocks is named after the shales at the foot of the pass, from Bain's geological work there. The Queen's Road has its own entry; this card covers only the Ecca Pass section. Ross lists a T.J. Lewis drawing of a wagon coming down the Ecca valley (Cape Archives E4305) and an A.H. Harkness painting of the Queen's Road at the Ecca Pass.

Find it

Pin
-33.20061, 26.61856
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