Matjiesfontein

James Logan arrived at Matjiesfontein in 1890, a Scottish official of the Cape Government Railways sent to recuperate from a chest complaint in the dry Karoo air. He recovered and decided to stay. Within a decade he had built one of the most remarkable settlements in South Africa: a Victorian village on the edge of the railway line, complete with London gas streetlamps, a soda water factory, the Lord Milner Hotel, a post office, a courthouse, and terraced houses lined with cast-iron railings and corrugated iron roofs.

During the Anglo-Boer War, Matjiesfontein became the headquarters of the Cape Command. More than 12,000 British troops and 20,000 horses were stationed here at the peak. Logan provisioned them all. The Lord Milner Hotel, completed in 1899, operated as the officers' mess. It is still open today and still has much of its Victorian furnishing intact.

The town was formally purchased in 1968 and preserved as a heritage site. The entire settlement was declared a National Monument in 1975. What you find when you stop — and the N1 runs directly past, making it an easy stop between Cape Town and Johannesburg — is a single main street where the clock appears to have stopped in 1900. The museum occupies a converted railway carriage. A red double-decker bus offers a brief town tour. The streetlamps still work.

It is one of the more peculiar and genuinely interesting places in the Western Cape, and almost every visitor driving the N1 either blows past it without stopping or stops and cannot quite believe it is real.