Castle Eyre

Location: Keiskammahoek

Sir George Cathcart, K.C.B., announced that the castle at Keiskammahoek was to be named ‘Castle Eyre’ in honour of the Lieut.-Colonel Eyre of the 73rd Regt. Concerning ‘Castle Eyre’, the Governor wrote:

“The tower is of stone found on the spot, rubble work, fifteen feet square and two stories high, with a flat roof to carry a gun. The cost will not exceed £300. The object is that for which church towers were originally no doubt intended in early stages of society where a more civilized race planted themselves among aborigines, viz. a rallying point from whence a very few men possessed of superior projectile weapons might command a radius within which the community, and even their cattle, might take shelter when suddenly beset by swarms of savages.

If such a precaution had been taken in the military villages (Woburn, Juanasberg, and Auckland) in the Tyumie Valley, the massacres perpetrated there at the beginning of the War of 1850 could not have taken place. But in the erection of this tower in the centre of the Amatolas and which I propose to call ‘Castle Eyre’, I have in contemplation a citadel around which it is hoped a town will arise in course of time. The enemy have no cannon. They cannot contemplate the battering of a wall or attack upon a defensible stone building.

The large enclosures chiefly made of mud with bastions, etc., called forts or posts, which I see in this country appear to me for the most part to be preposterous and must have been very costly. I find such posts most inconvenient, for, being constructed for a certain garrison, they are untenable without their complement, and it is sometimes a question with me whether to weaken my disposable force, to hold such forts or abandon them altogether. Most of them are in wrong places and no longer available at all.”