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Date: 1901 Type: Fort Status: Extant   Click to view map Coordinates: 34°02'07.60" S 23°03'22.69" E Alt: 100m

"The Royal Horse Guards regiment’s Major William Anstruther Thomson arrived in Knysna on the 1st of March to take over as commandant - and a month later, on on the 1st of June, Willowmore (about 140 km north-east of Knysna) was attacked by the Boers. In response, Maj. Thomson ordered the Guards to build a stone fort on Verdompskop - the pyramid-shaped hill just west of the present-day Knysna Hospital. (A well-named place for a fort if ever there was one: ‘verdomps’ in Dutch means something like ‘damnit,’ and kop means hill.) "Of course the War never got to Knysna, and the Fort never saw a shot fired in anger - but these weren’t the only reasons why the Fort was nicknamed Thomson’s Folly. "You see. many of the people in town thought it faced the wrong way. And those little, stubby guns at the foot of the flagpole? Carronades they were, dating back to about 1806. (The carronade was manufactured for the Royal Navy from the 1770s to the 1850s. Its main function was to serve as a powerful, short-range, anti-ship and anti-crew weapon.)" Extracted from the Knysna Museum website. (Submitted by Annelise Lange)