The Anglo-Boer Battlefields

A DIFFERENT WAR From The Anglo Zulu One Twenty Years Earlier: Spioenkop In January 1900, Where A British Force Took The Wrong Summit In Fog And Was Shot Off It The Next Day, The 118 Day Siege Of Ladysmith, And Colenso A Campaign In Which Winston Churchill Was Captured And Mohandas Gandhi Served As A Stretcher Bearer · Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal

This is a DIFFERENT WAR from the Anglo-Zulu one twenty years earlier, and the confusion between them is why the row begins by saying so. In January 1900 a British force climbed Spioenkop in fog, dug a shallow trench on what turned out to be the wrong summit, and spent the next day being shot at from higher ground they could not see - the trench is still there and so are the graves. Ladysmith a few kilometres east was besieged for a hundred and eighteen days. Colenso to the south was another defeat. Winston Churchill was in this campaign as a correspondent and was captured in it; Mohandas Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer at Spioenkop. What came later in the same war is harder: the British burned farms and moved civilians into camps where something like twenty-six thousand Boer women and children and an undetermined number of black South Africans died, and no honest account of these hills leaves that out.

Around Ladysmith in northern KwaZulu-Natal, with Spioenkop 35 km west and Colenso 25 km south, Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Spioenkop is in a provincial reserve with daylight hours and a conservation fee, and the battlefield itself is a walk up from the car park with the trench, the cairns and the graves marked - it is open ground on a summit. The Ladysmith Siege Museum beside the town hall and the Colenso sites keep daylight hours, and WHETHER EACH IS STAFFED VARIES, so ask in Ladysmith before driving out. As with the Anglo-Zulu row, GUIDES ARE WHAT MAKE THESE SITES LEGIBLE - specialist battlefield guides work from Ladysmith, Winterton and the Drakensberg lodges and are booked a day or more ahead. Accommodation is in Ladysmith, Winterton and at Drakensberg lodges nearby. Ladysmith is on the N3 about three hours from Durban and four from Johannesburg, Spioenkop is thirty-five kilometres west, and the whole area is MALARIA-FREE.

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