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The lovely Lonehill Koppie Print E-mail
Written by Lucille Davie   
The Lonehill Koppie with its massive boulders
The Lonehill Koppie with its massive boulders

THERE'S a story that if the top boulder of the Lonehill Koppie were dislodged, all the whites in the country would leave. It's a latter-day version of an Anglo Boer War tale: that if the Boers dislodged the rock, the British would lose the war and leave South Africa.


The Lonehill Koppie is beautiful - it stands out as a lone koppie on the northern border of the city's suburbs, some 28 kilometres north of the city centre, and is a reminder of what Johannesburg used to look like before it was settled: rocky veld with small streams trickling through it, dotted with shrubs, small trees and knee-high grasses. Guinea fowl and porcupines used to roam the area around the Koppie, and it's now populated with dozens of dassies. There's a small dam, called Lonehill Loch, around 200 metres north of the Koppie, a popular walking spot for local residents.

The Koppie is largely made up of large boulders, called tor rocks, very old rocks, with trees and indigenous shrubs now almost obscuring the rocks except for the very top boulders. The room-size boulders of Lonehill have a special quality to them, their towering height and massive shapes overwhelming one on the short hike to the top.

Lonehill community web site
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Half way up the Koppie there's further evidence of these early pastoral people - remnants of stone walls that would have been a kraal and living areas.


Lonehill community

The community of Lonehill consists of some 3 000 families, and they're a very organised bunch of people. Several years back there were 2-3 crime-related murders in the area. The residents responded proactively. They set up a trust account, into which each family was asked to pay a once-off initial amount of R1 500, and employed a security company to patrol the suburb in four vehicles and two motorcycles, with nine guards each day and night guarding the area.



He says: "We've had no shootings or deaths of residents in two and a half years. But we've had a number of guards shot at in the line of duty - they are now confronting criminals, 2-3 of whom have been killed."

Future security projects include erecting 20 SOS boxes around the suburb.

Bell also has a team of five gardeners. They spend time picking up litter in the suburb, trimming pavement lawns and public gardens. Residents' funds have been used to buy mowers, and Pikitup have been persuaded to place more rubbish bins around the dam.



Early history

The Koppie is part of two original farms, Zevenfontein and Rietfontein, registered in 1896. Simon Notten, a Hollander, who married Anna, the daughter of Sytze Wierda, President Paul Kruger's architect, noticed the distinctive koppie, then called Bobbejaanskranz, in 1934 and bought the two farms, consolidating them into one which he called Lonehill.





Atholl House, which early Johannesburg resident Juliet Marais Louw describes in admiring terms in Wagon-tracks and orchards - early days in Sandton, was subsequently demolished.





Simon and Anna Notten are buried in a quiet corner of the veld below the Lonehill Koppie. Alongside them is a grave with equally large headstone belonging to Philemon Rasebitse, who died of a heart attack at the age of 80. Rasebitse was the coachman of the architect Wierda before the Anglo Boer War, after which he went to work for the Nottens.

Rasebitse called Anna Notten "Marikasaan", according to Louw, which translates into "planter of trees". Atholl and Wierda Valley still boast some of the gums and pines that she planted in those suburbs. He had insisted that he be buried next to Notten, and was given "… a slap-up funeral, with a polished coffin and a hearse and an Anglican priest who came out from town".

The church, which had developed a lively Sunday school following, and later had a school operating from an additional hall behind it, gradually lost its congregation and its doors were closed in the 1950s. In 1966 a group of dedicated workers from the Rosebank Union Church spent some weeks cleaning out the church and replanting the garden.


The Nottens no longer have a presence at the Lonehill Koppie. The farmhouse that they extended over the years no longer exists - it's been swallowed up in a townhouse development. All that remains is a water tank erected on a concrete structure, and the graveyard.

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