Rural Port Elizabeth

Isn't it amazing that we live in a city with so much rural to it as well?

Humble Ways Road

This afternoon I went for a drive up to Humble Ways private nature reserve on Lovemore Heights.  It wasn't that I wanted to go for a walk, I just wanted to drive down the track to the gate through the vegetation tunnel around the track.

City farm

Would you guess that this picture was taken in the middle of Port Elizabeth?  It is the area of small holdings between Charlo, Lovemore Heights and Lorraine.  Literally a farm in the middle of the city.  The pic was snapped from The Pink Fig coffee shop on Heatherbank Road.

Lovemore Heights Christmas Tree

The Grootendorst family living at the top of Melsetter Road in Lovemore Heights has gone all out this year to make the outside of their house a Christmas lights wonderland.  They made a big occasion of switching it on a couple of weeks ago with the Eastern Cape Youth Choir singing, Father Christmas visiting and party packs given to all the kids.  Literally hundreds of people came that night and has since stopped outside over weekends to show their kids.  The lights are going to be on each evening this whole week leading up to Christmas so if you are in Port Elizabeth, do swing by and have a look.  

Humble Ways bench

Looking for a tranquil spot with a bench to enjoy the view?  I found this one close to the chapel in the Humble Ways private nature reserve on Lovemore Heights.

Arc of the 30th Meridian

I took the KidZ on a Geocaching outing over the weekend to find a cache called Arc of the 30th Meridian.  It's located close to a trig beacon in the Humble Ways private nature reserve on top of Lovemore Heights and is one of the oldest caches in Port Elizabeth.  In the picture Chaos Boy is signing the logbook while Drama Princess strikes a pose.

 The trig beacon is one in a series of 26, which are the first set of historic astronomical stations measured in order to establish the groundwork of the Arc of the 30th Meridian.  The Arc of the 30th Meridian is a set of triangulation measurements effectively creating an arc from Port Elizabeth in South Africa to Cairo in Egypt through the entire African continent.

 

The purpose of the measurement was to determine the size and shape of the Earth.

 

This beacon represents the Southern most point of a chain of triangles measured along the 30th meridian through Botswana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi,  Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and ending near Cairo in Egypt.

 

Prior to 1999 the beacon was also the origin of the geodetic survey of South Africa.

The project was initiated by Sir David Gill, the Astronomer Royal at the Cape in 1879 and the final measurements were completed in the Sudan 1954.

The arc, known as the Arc of the 30th Meridian, can be connected across the Mediterranean Sea through Crete and Belarus to a similar arc measured through Europe terminating at North Cape in Norway.  The European arc is known as the Struve Arc and together these two arcs cover nearly 105º in latitude which is over 11650 Km in length.

Humble Ways bell

The bell outside the Humble Ways Chapel.  Humble Ways is a private nature reserve on Lovemore Heights and the perfect spot to go for a short walk to get away from it all yet still being less than a kilometers from civilisation.

One of the Lovemore family graveyards

he Lovemore surname is closely linked to Port Elizabeth and it's early history, specially out in the western side of the city.  This is all thanks to one Henry LOVEMORE who left England to settle in Port Elizabeth in 1820.  Although he came at the time of the British Settlers who settled east of the city around Grahamstown and Bathurst, Lovemore paid for his passage and purchased Bushy Park, then known as Klaas Kraal, for the princely sum of one thousand pounds.

Lore has it that Henry was the illegitimate son of George III but this is said to have been disproven.  Henry's riches weren't royal at all but came from many taverns he owned in around Fleet Street, area of London.  Blue blood or not, Henry did leave a huge legacy in the form of ten children from three of his four marriages.

Land owned by the Lovemore family included the present day suburbs of Lovemore Heights, Charlo and Heatherbank.  The family graveyards are at the three main Lovemore homesteads being at Bushy Park, Benmore off Circular Drive in Charlo and Preston Park in Paterson.  There is another one in Lovemore Heights where a number of family graves can also be found and it was this one where I took the picture above.