Kaapsehoop and the Wild Horses

An 1880s Gold Village On The Lip Of The Escarpment, Where Mist Belt Grassland Ends In A Cliff And The Lowveld Opens Out A Kilometre Below With A Free Roaming Herd Of Horses That Has Lived Wild On This Plateau For Generations And Is The Reason Most People Come, Though THE HORSES ARE NOT KEPT AND MAY NOT BE SEEN · Kaapsehoop, Mpumalanga

The Mpumalanga escarpment ends here in a cliff, and the Lowveld starts a kilometre straight down. Kaapsehoop sits a few hundred metres back from that edge: an 1880s gold village of tin roofs and stone cottages on high mist-belt grassland, with a short walk out to a viewpoint where the land simply stops and you can see halfway to Mozambique on a clear day. The other reason people come is the horses. A herd has lived loose on this plateau for generations - the usual explanation is animals left behind when the mines and the forestry camps wound down - and they graze the grassland and the verges without being owned, fed or managed by anybody. They are genuinely wild in the practical sense and they move, so nobody can promise you a sighting. The other thing nobody can promise is the view, because the mist here closes in for days at a time and the cliff disappears entirely, which is the other thing to make peace with before you drive up.

On the escarpment edge south-west of Nelspruit, where the land falls away into the Lowveld, Kaapsehoop, Mpumalanga, South Africa

A village and a public viewpoint, open at any hour and free. THE WALK TO THE ESCARPMENT EDGE is a short path from the village over grassland and rock, and THE EDGE IS UNFENCED - there is nothing between you and a kilometre of air, which matters with children and in mist. THE HORSES ARE FREE-ROAMING AND ARE NOT FED, OWNED OR MANAGED, so they may be on the village verges, out on the plateau, or nowhere you can find them; dawn and dusk are the best odds. The handful of restaurants, pubs and guesthouses keep informal hours and several close midweek out of season. MIST CAN CLOSE THE VIEW FOR DAYS. Nelspruit is 35 km east with everything; the village has almost no shops. MALARIA-FREE at altitude.

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