Van Ryneveld's Pass

AndrewDocumented

Superintended the construction without pay; awarded a medal in 1832. Convict labour and dry-stone retaining walls; one research guide adds Stretch.

—Route

2.1 km(current R63 alignment)Length

835 mSummit

Tarred(R63)Surface

See it on the map Log your drive

Before you go

Short road along Nqweba Dam; normal city/highway traffic caution.

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 original pass is largely buried beneath the modern road or submerged by the Nqweba Dam. The current R63 alignment is 2.1 km long and has an altitude variance of 40 m.

Named after Willem Cornelius van Ryneveld, Civil Commissioner and Resident Magistrate of Graaff-Reinet 1834–1850. Graaff-Reinet sits on the Sundays River but struggled for water from its founding; canals from the 1880s could not keep up and an acute shortage in the Anglo-Boer War forced a permanent solution. The dam (renamed Nqweba, Xhosa for "meeting place", in 2001) was surveyed in 1918, started late 1920, first concrete November 1922, a flood in March 1924 hit before the wall was closed, and it opened on 14 July 1925; about 800 workers lived on site while Graaff-Reinet had roughly 8,000 residents. The dam was empty in December 1930 and first overflowed again in January 1932. It sits in what is now Camdeboo National Park, where four rivers meet. Ross's chronology: built in 1832 (documents in the Bain Family Papers, UCT) by Andrew Bain without pay, assisted by surveyor Charles Lennox Stretch; the road lies "under the silt" of the dam. The grateful inhabitants gave him an inscribed medal in 1834. The pass was deviated along the hillside to the west in 1924 when the dam wall was built (the dam itself 1921–25). Ross's comment: "It is really not much of a pass!" Karoo Heartland and the Heritage Portal add that nearly 250,000 bags of cement went into the wall (33 m maximum height, 169 m spillway, triangular section 30 m wide at the base); a flood on 24 March 1924 delayed closing the wall gap. The opening brochure says the dam held some 79 billion litres at full capacity. The opening plaque has since disappeared and only a photograph survives, reproduced in Johannes Haarhoff's 56-page book for the Graaff-Reinet Museum. The Heritage Portal states plainly that the original pass was built by Graaff-Reinet resident Andrew Geddes Bain. A local anecdote says a traffic officer stopped a car of Graaff-Reinet ladies near Cape Town in the early 1970s just to ask the state of the dam.

History

Built by: Superintended the construction without pay; awarded a medal in 1832. Convict labour and dry-stone retaining walls; one research guide adds Stretch.
Built: 1832, taking two years; another account lists it as 1830s.
Location: Immediately outside Graaff-Reinet, Eastern Cape
Later work: Realigned.Realigned higher up the river bank during construction of Van Ryneveld’s Pass Dam (now Nqweba Dam); dam construction ran 1920–1925. The exact date of the road realignment is not separately stated.
Notes: The original pass was largely buried beneath the modern road or submerged by the dam. The pass was realigned higher up the river bank during dam construction. The dam was built 1920–1925, but the realignment itself is not precisely dated. The pass is said to date from 1832 but is named for a commissioner who held office from 1834, so the naming date is unclear. Dam figures differ between sources (storage 46.4 vs 80 million m³; catchment 3,668 vs 3,800 km²). The Wikipedia and Heritage Portal pages do not describe the pass road itself. Storrar queries whether Bain finished the road in 1832 or 1834 (the medal date). Concrete volume in the brochure is given as around 2,200 cubic metres, which looks low for the size of the wall; it is quoted as printed.

Van Ryneveld's Pass

Before you go

About this pass

History

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