If you’re lucky on a lazy Sunday, riding your bike along the river’s edge of Delta Park in Craighall Park you can spot horses grazing across the river, without a care and looking pretty much like they are part of the original Boer farm Klipfontein, dating from 1865. Sometimes you’ll bump into the horses strolling along the trails, and you better mind your way, they’re bigger than bikes.
The horses are stabled in what is now an urban farm in the suburbs, with much on offer. You can buy your wine from the winery there; get your medicinal mushrooms at the mini mushroom farm; take your pooch to the village vet; purchase artisanal garments; make an appointment with a range of medical practitioners to get your body beaten back into shape at the physio, biokinetic, occupational therapy and Pilates studios; or visit the natural medicine and iridology clinic. And when you’re done with this magic, you can stop in at Colourful Splendour nursery to buy your pot of mint or tray of petunia seedlings. It’s a village in a city.
Bikes and horses
Bikes are welcome at the Delta Café on the farm, right on the edge of the Braamfontein spruit, with tables almost spilling over the river, and a great menu to give you back those calories you’ve burnt slogging up the Delta Park hill on your bike. While eating your pizza you can watch the horses being exercised in the ring alongside the restaurant, and forget for a while that Joburg is a town where people live in gated estates, with electric fences and security vehicles patrolling the streets.
Cafe owner Daniel Basch started with six tables 11 years ago, and has grown with the village, taking a large part of the northeastern corner, with a playground and sunken garden. He plans to adopt part of immediate river and keep it clean, particularly after flooding.
Klipfontein originally belonged to J Labuschagne as part of his farm Boskop. In time the farm was divided to become Klipfontein. In 1891 William Rattray bought a portion of Klipfontein and renamed it Craighall after his hometown in Scotland, now present day Craighall, Craighall Park and Blairgowrie. He created a leisurely lake, with the lovely stone wall at the bottom of Conrad Drive the only evidence of it now. It had a waterside hotel, where townspeople used to ride out for picnics, boating and fishing. It was a day’s ride by horse, and when the river flooded, farmers were cut off from the postman and the doctor until the spruit, which rises as a spring in Berea, subsided.
Sadly the lake, which apparently had trout, silted up in the 1930s, creating an island above the dam wall, and that’s how it remains today. But the horses enjoy splashing through the spruit and sharing the trails with the bikers, walkers and runners at Delta Park.
I wonder if Labuschagne or Rattray could have imagined how popular the park would be today, or how the building in the middle of the park played a huge role in expanding the town northwards. Established in 1934 by the visionary city engineer Ernest Hamlin, the Art Deco building was built as one of four sewerage farms in Joburg, catering for the rapidly encroaching suburbs of Parktown, Parkhurst, Emmarentia, Greenside and Auckland Park. The building itself housed various processes. Farmers were still grazing their cows in the grasslands around the building at the time, which were richly fertilised with by-products from the plant.
Ahead of its time, methane gas was turned into electricity to power the plant. By the time the Delta plant closed in 1963, Hamlin already had the Northern Waste Water Treatment Works near Diepsloot up and running.
Four houses along the road leading into the park housed workers and managers, now badly neglected, occupied largely by municipal workers. The park retains its Art Deco entrance gates, complete with metal post boxes on poles, some with ancient letters in them, echoes of a time long forgotten. The main building, now an environmental education centre, is the starting point for the weekly parkrun.
But back to the farm.
The Ranger Stables date from 2001. Most horses and ponies are rescue animals, and with love and hugs have become “pretty fat”, says owner Claire Almond. “There has been good grazing this year with the rains.”
There are now 22 horses and ponies, that make children and adults happy with pony rides, parties and camps, even coming to your house for a horsey party. “There is a special feeling down there, to be somewhere calm, the whole of REEA [Rand Epileptic Employment Association] is such a special place,” adds Almond. It is. I popped into the stables late on a Sunday afternoon, and the happy horses were munching their supper from hanging bundles of hay, while the stable hands were tying their winter jackets around their torsos for the evening.
There is a special feeling down there, to be somewhere calm, the whole of REEA is such a special place.
I thought I’d sample the Gerakaris Family Wines on a laid-back Sunday afternoon. The “holistic wine enterprise” was founded by New Zealander Kath Gerakaris in 2010, she writes on her website. She produces two chenin blancs and three syrahs, to be savoured in their sunny garden. “Bunches of grapes arrive fresh to be pressed, fermented, aged and bottled right here on the premises in Craighall Park.” The tasting comes with a cheese board, with olives from the Western Cape, and Wagyu beef biltong from the Eastern Cape. “Our garden is small and we like it this way because we can chat to everyone about what we do.”
Originally the village consisted of three greenhouses, built in 1934 for the REEA to create jobs for men with severe epilepsy, the brainchild of three doctors, with hostels provided for the men nearby, now housing 38 adults. The nurseries were supplemented with poultry farming, and while the latter have disappeared, the nursery is still going strong. REEA won awards for its plants and flowers, and had vans delivering plants to Joburgers. It had noble aims: “It therefore formed part of therapy and income-generating projects especially in the early years,” according to a 2011 report by Tsica Heritage Consultants. This helped them lead a normal life.
The original heritage greenhouses need repair but two have been incorporated into the present nursery. But the legacy continues — the present nursery is lush and busy, alongside the charity and book shops run by REEA.
Co2 Nutraceutics grows its own medicinal mushrooms, and bottles them on the site. “We grow 10 different mushrooms,” says owner Sandra Dewes. With exotic names like lion’s mane and turkey tail, the latter helps with gut health and cancer prevention, with scientific backing, says Dewes. “I can’t begin to tell you how many people we’ve helped, with cancer, stress and anxiety, autoimmune diseases, stroke and neuralgia.” I’m trying the Elixir capsules.
No bike shop in the village but food, wine, horses, books, plants, health, mushrooms and a river that runs through it. Joburg can rock when it wants to.
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