A long, low 19th-century house faces the back of Spandau Kop, in a corner of Graaff-Reinet where the Sundays River does a protective loop around the town. Located in Donkin Street, it’s one of the many surviving green-shuttered, whitewashed houses that give this town at the heart of the hot, hot Great Karoo its homogeneous character. At the back, a garden filled with fruit trees has at its centre, a 14-metre pool from whose surrounding loungers there’s an unimpeded view of the peak that, at the heart of the Valley of Desolation, takes its name from a castle standing sentinel over a town near Berlin.
