Sutherland

The high Roggeveld plateau on which Sutherland stands was grazing country for Khoekhoe herders before trekboer farmers moved up the escarpment with their sheep. The plateau is among the coldest places in South Africa, and the Roggeveld Mountains separate it from the lower-lying Tankwa Karoo to the west; sheep farming shaped settlement here long before there was a village.

Sutherland itself was established in the mid-1850s as a church and market town for the scattered sheep farms, and it was named after the Reverend Henry Sutherland, a Dutch Reformed minister who travelled to the Roggeveld each year to hold services. The village grew slowly around the church, a school and a few shops; the church that dominates the skyline dates from 1899. During the South African War British troops used the church as a fort, several clashes took place in the town, and the ruins of a fort remain on Rebelskop, a hill outside the village.

For most of its history Sutherland was known mainly for sheep farming, for its reputation as the coldest town in South Africa, and as the birthplace in 1906 of the poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, a central figure in Afrikaans literature. That changed after the South African Astronomical Observatory chose a ridge outside the village for its telescopes in the early 1970s, valuing the altitude, the dry air and the darkness. The Southern African Large Telescope, inaugurated in 2005, made the site internationally significant, and astronomy tourism has since become the village's second economy alongside sheep farming.

Life here is that of a small Karoo dorp: Afrikaans-speaking, church-centred and organised around the farming year of lambing, shearing and the wool clip. The church is the social as well as the spiritual centre, and its bazaars, funerals and services still mark the calendar. Families have farmed the surrounding plateau for generations, and conversation with a stranger usually starts with the weather, which here is a serious subject.

The cold is a point of identity. Residents compare winters, and record low temperatures are discussed with the pride other towns reserve for sport. Snow is common in winter, and it brings day visitors up the passes when it falls, and the village takes a certain pleasure in being the place other South Africans think of as unbearably cold.

The observatory has given the village a second, quite different culture. Astronomers and technicians live and work nearby, visitors arrive with telescopes and cameras, and guesthouses have learned to serve dinner early so that guests can be outside under a dark sky by nightfall. Keeping light pollution down is a shared local practice, backed since 2007 by a national law protecting the site's dark skies. Literary visitors come for the Louw connection, and Afrikaans poetry has an unusually strong presence in the village's sense of itself.

About 3,000 people live in Sutherland, most of them in the village itself, which serves an enormous and almost empty district of sheep farms. Wool and mutton are the economic base, with tourism — guesthouses, tours, restaurants and guides — now providing a large share of local work, and the observatory employing staff and buying services locally. The municipality, the schools and the clinic account for much of the rest.

The village is small enough that everyone knows the traffic on the main street. Farming families come in for supplies, church and school, and the population of the district is far more dispersed than the village figure suggests. Housing divides between the older village core and the areas built for coloured residents under apartheid planning, a division still visible in the street layout and in income.

Daily rhythms follow the light and the cold. Work is done in the daytime, fires and heaters go on early in winter, and the village is quiet well before the sky gets interesting. Water supply, distance from services, the state of the gravel roads and the shortage of jobs for young people are the standing concerns; power cuts have shaped routines for years, though here they also produce a darker sky. Visitors, and the money they bring for a few nights at a time, matter disproportionately to the village economy.

Karoo lamb is the centre of everything. Sheep grazed on the plateau's aromatic scrub produce meat with a flavour that carries a regional reputation, and it is served as chops over the coals, as a slow-roasted leg, as lamb pie, or cooked for hours in a potjie, the three-legged iron pot set on a fire. Skilpadjies, lamb's liver wrapped in caul fat and grilled, and tongue, kidneys and other offal dishes are part of the tradition on farms.

Winter cooking suits the cold: thick soups, bredies — stews of mutton with tomato, cabbage or waterblommetjies — samp and beans, and pumpkin dishes. Bread is often made on the fire, as roosterkoek on the braai grid or potbrood in a cast-iron pot, and buttermilk rusks are dipped in coffee at almost any hour. Melktert, koeksisters and moskonfyt, a syrup made from grape must, appear on the sweet side.

Game from the plateau, especially springbok, is eaten as steaks, stews and biltong, and biltong and droëwors are the standard snack for the long drives. There is little in the way of restaurant choice, so evening meals in guesthouses and guest farms are where most visitors eat, with dinner served early enough to get outside under the stars afterwards. Rooibos tea, grown in the mountains to the west, is the regional drink.