When we stopped in Nylstroom for lunch on our way to the Waterberg, we parked in the grounds of the Dutch Reformed Church for our picnic. I took a few photographs of the church and its surroundings, one of which you see below.
photograph by ChigyTweet
published under a Creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
The church is interesting for many reasons, firstly for being situated in Nylstroom which was founded in the 1860s by a Voortrekker group known as the Jerusalem Trekkers who aiming to trek to the Holy Land. Following the maps at the back of their Bibles they believed they had reached the Nile river and decided to stay.
The Dutch Reformed Church was built in 1898 and is the oldest church in sub-saharan Africa north of Pretoria. The church was also used as a hospital during the Second Boer War and was near a British concentration camp 544 lives were lost.
Compare this to the Saint Denis in Massy from my last post,
photograph by ChigyTweet
published under a Creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
which was built sometime between the years 1030 and 1040. It was Constructed to replace a chapel thought to be too old and too little it still stands almost 1 000 years later and was already more than 800 years old when work started on the Nylstroom Church
The roof of the church is supported by a wood frame that was covered in 1708. The altar dates to the period of Louis XV and sits atop another altar that might date to when the church was built.
On the outside of Saint-Denis the most striking feature is the church’s bell tower with it’s descriptive Lombard Bands and the zigzag stone work.
Concepts of age, history and craftsmanship are vastly different in the two "towns"
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