GOAT HEAVEN IN B’BOS

I was intrigued to read the article “Baardskeerdersbos: what you see is what you get” in the Spring 2017 issue of Platteland. As a student at UCT I used to camp in out-of-the-way places around the Western Cape and this is how I landed up in this cute hamlet in 1969. Baardskeerdersbos was still an isolated community at that time, and I remember arriving on a Sunday to find that the female inhabitants still wore old-fashioned Dutch kappies.

Some say the shorter “B’bos” is a modern invention by Englishspeaking people who found Baardskeerdersbos too difficult to pronounce, but my wife, Sue (neé Molloy), telephoned her Aunt Biddy, who is about 80 years old and used to visit Sue’s grandfather, Frederick Jackson Finch Ecclestone, on his farm near Pearly Beach. Biddy remembers that it was already referred to as B’bos back then.

Five years ago, in 2012, we visited the area again to see what had happened to the farm outside Pearly Beach and the hamlet of Baardskeerdersbos, and came across this goat lording it in “Goat Heaven”.