Bokbaai, the farm and its people

'The house at the edge of the sea', is how Lord Charles Somerset remembered Bokbaai during his retirement in London. Bokbaai has a pre-colonial as well as a recorded history of peaceful seclusion as rare asymmetrical gabled house, world renowned wildflowers, the cold Atlantic Sea, kilometres of rock shores, sandy beaches and dunes, a spectacular view of Table Mountain and air like champagne. The farm has legends, myths, stories of ships and histories political, social and personal, like that of the Kübe family who were overseers of the Government lime works and the convicts some of whom were slaves, who laboured there in chains, and the Duckitt family as its custodians and their faithful caretakers, Jan and Susie Bokbaai. There are graves from the previous four centuries and Dutch and British shipwrecks from those days. Famous Cape edifices that are now national and provincial monuments were built between 1811 and 1826 with Bokbaai's lime. The farm, already a provincial heritage site, has under the Mapula Trust's custodianship been registered as a provincial nature reserve and will be used as an environmental education centre.