Nieu-Bethesda and the Owl House

Helen Martins Spent Thirty Years Filling A Small Karoo House With Crushed Glass Walls And Its Yard With Hundreds Of Cement Owls, Camels, Wise Men And Pilgrims All Facing East, Then Took Her Own Life In 1976 The Result Is One Of The Strangest And Most Unsettling Places In Africa, In A Village With No Streetlights At The End Of A Gravel Road · Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape

Nieu-Bethesda is a Karoo village at the end of a gravel road fifty kilometres north of Graaff-Reinet, with no streetlights, donkey carts and about fifteen hundred people. In one small house in it, Helen Martins spent roughly thirty years from the 1940s turning the interior into something else: walls and ceilings coated in crushed glass in ground colour, mirrors angled to throw light, every surface worked. In the yard outside she and a labourer named Koos Malgas built hundreds of cement sculptures - owls, camels, wise men, mermaids, pilgrims - most of them facing east towards a Mecca she had read about. Her eyesight failed from the glass dust, and in 1976 she took her own life by drinking caustic soda. The result is one of the most extraordinary places in Africa and one of the most unsettling, and the row says both because tidying her into a charming eccentric would be a lie about what is standing there.

In a Karoo valley 50 km north of Graaff-Reinet, reached on gravel off the N9, Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape, South Africa

The Owl House keeps daylight hours daily with a modest ticket and is run as a museum by the village, covering the house interior and the Camel Yard behind it - WHETHER THE WHOLE CAMEL YARD IS OPEN VARIES WITH CONSERVATION WORK, because cement sculpture outdoors in the Karoo deteriorates and sections get fenced. Photography rules inside the house have changed more than once, so ask at the desk. The village itself is open ground with no streetlights, which is part of the experience after dark. The Compassberg and the surrounding farms offer walks and stays. Nieu-Bethesda is reached on about twenty kilometres of GRAVEL off the N9, passable in a saloon in dry weather and rough after rain. Graaff-Reinet is fifty kilometres south with shops and fuel. The village is MALARIA-FREE, very cold in winter and very hot in summer.

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