Churches of the Karoo

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The Cradock Dutch Reformed Church.

© Chris Marais

If you were a Briton and you drove past the Dutch Reformed Mother Church in the Karoo town of Cradock, you may well experience a distinct sensation of déjà vu.

That’s because this church is a spitting image of St Martin's in the Field in Trafalgar Square, London.

And, like other churches of the Karoo, it has a story to tell

The Karoo legend of this Cradock church is that the pastor’s wife was English and pining for her home country. This influenced the church leaders in choosing a design that paid homage to the genius of Sir Christopher Wren in its Corinthian portico, clock and Gothic steeple.

Across the Great Karoo in Graaff-Reinet, the Victorian Gothic Mother Church looms – like its sister in Cradock – over all.

An interesting design element of the Graaff-Reinet church is the series of small crowned heads carved into the stone.

To the south, the dusty little village of Rietbron has the only church steeple in the country that sports a leaping springbok emblem instead of the customary rooster.

Back in the 19^th Century, the Dutch Reformed Churches were built with verve and style. And, it seems, there was no shortage of stone.

You had Gothic, you had Wren and, in the case of the Mother Church in Somerset East, you had a Dutch Renaissance tower rising from a thatched nave on the Eastern façade.

Other facts about churches of the Karoo:

• The Dutch Reformed Church in the village of Pearston stands at the foot of the Plains of Camdeboo. Back in the mid-1800s church services were held in the outdoors under a giant pear tree.

• The Dutch Reformed Church in Philippolis is most famous for its pulpit, which was carved from wild olive and put together using no nails, screws or bolts.
  
  
• Before the Dutch Reformed Church came into being in Colesberg, this Northern Cape town was more famous for its gunrunners, horse thieves and rum runners.

The Anglican church in the Karoo had its champion in the form of architect Sophia Gray (1814 – 1871), the wife of the bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray.

Of the 40 churches she designed in South Africa, 15 of them were in the Great- and Little Karoo, from Montagu to Graaff-Reinet, Colesberg to Fraserburg. Most of them were built in the neo-Gothic style, with a decidedly British feel to them.

Gray was also a noted artist, and her watercolours of the churches she helped build are to be seen in a book called The Bishop’s Churches by Desmond Martin (Struik, 2005).