"Montagu" a Montagu Travel Page by mke1963

Behind the Langeberg Mountains lies the unfeasibly pretty town of Montagu, a magnet for Cape Town's genteel and well-heeled chattering classes anxious for a return to old time values and landscapes. Squeezed rather unnecessarily into the joins of several big chunks of dusky yellow mountain, at the convergence of two small rivers, Montagu portrays itself as the Gateway to the Klein Karoo. So do many other towns, and Montagu feels more like the final exit from the gravel and the dry air of the Klein Karoo, its deep fertile alluvial soils having little in common with the Karoo thirstlands. Montagu is from the era of Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith, but it is from the mould of Stratford-upon-Avon, Giverny and Zons: tea rooms, wine-tasting and galleries. It is no surprise that artists are flocking here: like Nieuw-Bethesda but with broadband and a Rotary Club.

The hot springs which lie above the town were known to both Europeans and indigenous peoples for many centuries, but the difficulty of getting beyond the Langeberg Mountains prevented it from being anything other than the stuff of expeditions and adventurers until the first erven were sold in anticipation of better communication in the future. Even then, Agter Cogmanskloof, as it was then known, was not exactly the community of choice, but the fertile agricultural lands of Ashton and Robertson were fast fliing up and second sons were running out of places to go. The first land plots were sold in 1851 and the Dutch Reformed Church set up shop three years later. The promised road, a tortuous affair through the impossibly narrow Cogman's Kloof, appeared in 1877. The safety valve was well and truly open and people spilled out into the new valley. Montagu is not particularly old, but it has managed to preserve the appearance of the late colonial era agricultural town, with Long Street still having that attractive mix of farms, houses and fields of grapes and apple trees as its focal point. The value of the land sent the traders and commercial interests scuttling up the drier slopes, and now the comercial centre is higher up, removing the pressure from Long Street. Walking along Long Street, remember that although it looks like a semi-rural area, this is precisely what South African towns looked like 120 years ago - a good mix of soil and structure. The town centre that we know now everywhere is a much more recent development.

Agter Cogmansklof was renamed in honour of John Montagu, the British Colonial Secretary in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although any colonial administrator tends to be viewed with very mixed feelings these days, there is little doubt that in the context of that era, Montagu was a decent man of integrity, enthusiasm and passion for his responsibilities. Many administrators treated their job as merely a stepping stone to more power and regarded the Colonies as simply a miserable nuisance: Montagu, however, pushed forward road and infrastructure schemes that brought immeasurable benefits for the country. The Bains may get the credit for the spectacular passes, but without Montagu there would have been no money to even think about building them. The Bains may have been the buidlers, but Montagu was the architect of much of the physical improvements in communications in the colony.

Today Montagu is peaceful - maybe excessively so - and a relaxing place, verging on the twee. It jealously guards its cultural heritage, not without some resentment from people who can no longer afford to live in or near the town, and there is the danger of the town becoming a retirement town (like "nearby" Barrydale) with the inevitable impac on the social fabric of the area. Retirement towns prove that youth and kids hanging around idly being kids really is necessary for the sustainability of society; I, for one, hope that Montagu doesn't become like Barrydale which has a feel of cute lethargy that is just insipid and eventually appeals to no-one.