Winterton

San hunter-gatherers lived in the Drakensberg foothills for thousands of years and left painted shelters throughout the valleys above the town, among the richest concentrations of rock art in the world. Nguni-speaking farmers settled the upper Tugela valley, which became part of the Zulu kingdom's sphere in the early nineteenth century. Voortrekkers crossed the escarpment into this country in 1837, and the valley was farmed by settlers after Britain annexed Natal in 1843.

The district's best-known event came in the South African War. In January 1900 a British force fighting its way towards besieged Ladysmith seized the hill the Boers call Spioenkop, north of the present town, and found at dawn that it was overlooked from higher ground. The day's fighting killed and wounded large numbers on the exposed summit and ended in British withdrawal. Among those present in the campaign were Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi as a stretcher-bearer, and Louis Botha commanding on the Boer side.

The town itself was founded in 1905 as Springfield, when the Natal government built a weir across the Little Tugela River; it was renamed Winterton after H. D. Winter, the colony's secretary for agriculture, and grew as the centre of an irrigated maize and dairy district. Its second life began with mountain tourism: hotels and guest farms opened in the Champagne Valley from the mid-twentieth century, the Drakensberg Boys' Choir School was founded in 1967, and the escarpment park was linked with Lesotho's Sehlabathebe National Park as a World Heritage Site in 2001, making the town the gateway to the central Drakensberg.

Two worlds meet in Winterton. One is farming: commercial maize, dairy and beef families, many of English or Afrikaans descent, whose year turns on planting, rain and the co-operative in town, and whose social life runs through the sports clubs, the agricultural show and the church. The other is Zulu: the villages of the surrounding communal land, where isiZulu is spoken, cattle carry social weight, and traditional authorities and ceremonies remain part of life.

Mountain culture binds both to the visitors. Guides, rescue volunteers, horse-trail operators and lodge staff form a small, tight community, and hiking, trout fishing, horse riding and paragliding are the pastimes that define the district. San rock art is treated seriously: the paintings belong to a people almost entirely displaced from these mountains, and guided visits and strict handling rules are the norm at the main shelters.

The Drakensberg Boys Choir, based in the Champagne Valley, gives the area a musical reputation out of proportion to its size, and its concerts are an institution for South African families. Craft studios, potteries, weavers and a small brewery along the valley road have grown up alongside. Manners are rural and unhurried: greetings first, conversation about the weather and the state of the roads, and an assumption that anyone on a mountain path will stop and talk.

A few thousand people live in the town and many more in the farms and communal settlements around it, which fall within the rural municipality reaching from the mountains to the N3. The centre is small — a main street of shops, a co-operative, banks, a clinic and schools — and it serves a district far larger than itself.

Agriculture is the base of the economy: irrigated maize, dairy, beef, timber and trout, with the Tugela and its dams providing the water. Tourism is the second pillar, employing much of the local workforce in lodges, resorts and guiding along the valley roads, and the two are closely linked, since many guest farms are working farms. Unemployment in the surrounding rural areas is high, and many households depend on grants and on wages earned in Gauteng.

Everyday concerns are water supply, road maintenance on the valley routes, electricity interruptions of the kind seen across South Africa, and the seasonal swing in visitor numbers that decides whether there is work. Winters are cold and clear, and life moves early; summer afternoons are broken by storms that empty the streets. Weekends bring sport, church and family gatherings, and the mountain rescue teams — largely volunteers — are on call all year.

This is farm country, and its food is plain and substantial. Beef and lamb off the braai, boerewors, pap with a tomato and onion sauce, potjiekos slow-cooked over coals, and biltong and droëwors dried in farm sheds are the local standards. Sunday lunch is a fixture, and roadside stalls sell boerewors rolls and pies to travellers turning off the N3.

Dairy is the district's speciality. Milk, cream, butter and farmhouse cheeses are made locally and sold from farm gates along the valley roads, alongside honey, jams and preserves made from the fruit of the foothills. Trout, farmed and caught in the cold mountain streams, appears smoked, grilled or in pâté on most menus in the valley, and a small brewery and several farm kitchens supply the guest farms.

Zulu cooking is the everyday food of the surrounding countryside: phuthu, the dry crumbly maize porridge, with amasi, soured milk; stews of beans, pumpkin and wild greens known as imifino; and meat grilled over coals at shisa nyama stands, with chakalaka relish. Umqombothi, the home-brewed maize and sorghum beer, is made for ceremonies. Maize itself is the crop that surrounds the town, sold green and roasted at the roadside in late summer.