The Drakensberg, the dragon mountains and their rock art

Nobody quite knows who first called these mountains the Drakensberg, or why. The name is Afrikaans, from the Dutch the earliest settlers used for the great escarpment, and it means the dragon mountains. Some say it was the jagged line of the peaks; the story told most often involves a father and son who reported a dragon flying through the clouds above them. The Zulu name is uKhahlamba, usually translated as the barrier of spears, and it is the better description: a wall of rock running along the edge of the high plateau, with the peaks standing up from it like a row of points.

The wall is the thing. The Drakensberg rises to 3,482 metres at Thabana Ntlenyana, the highest peak in southern Africa. Below the escarpment the land falls away in long grassy spurs and deep valleys towards KwaZulu-Natal, and it is in those valleys and the rock shelters beneath the cliffs that the mountains keep their oldest treasure.

The painted shelters

The San, the hunter-gatherers whose ancestors were here long before farmers or settlers, lived in these mountains for more than four thousand years. In the overhangs and shallow caves beneath the cliffs they painted: eland and rhebok, people dancing and hunting, figures that are part human and part animal. UNESCO, which inscribed the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park as a World Heritage Site in 2000, as the first site in South Africa recognised for both its natural and its cultural value, describes it as the largest and most concentrated group of rock paintings in Africa south of the Sahara. Counts vary with who is counting and what they include, but the park is usually said to hold some six hundred sites and more than thirty-five thousand individual images.

It would be easy to read the paintings as a simple record of daily life, hunting and dancing. One panel, more than any other, showed outsiders that there was more to them than that.

At Game Pass Shelter, in the Kamberg Nature Reserve, a painted eland stumbles as it dies, its head lowered and its hind legs crossing, and a figure holds its tail. The figure's own legs are crossed in the same way and end in hooves. Archaeologists have called it the Rosetta Stone of southern African rock art, because it helped them see that the art was spiritual, a shaman shown partly transformed into the dying animal. It is reached on a guided walk of about three hours from the Kamberg Rock Art Centre, and like most of the painted shelters it is best seen with someone who knows how to read it.

Walking in the 'Berg

That is the other reason to come: the walking. The Drakensberg is a range for walkers of every ambition, from a morning's stroll up a valley to a painted overhang to multi-day routes along the top of the escarpment. The paths climb through grassland and cross streams to the foot of the great cliffs. The weather is part of the experience. Summer can bring sudden thunderstorms, and the drier months from April to September are the usual choice for walking, though winter evenings are very cold, so the mountains reward an early start and a warm layer whatever the season.

The paintings are fragile, painted on open rock, and the sensible rule at any site is simply to look and not to touch.

Tours that include the Drakensberg

Two Explore Worldwide tours in the catalogue include the Drakensberg Mountains among their places, and both combine them with Rorke's Drift, where on 22 and 23 January 1879 a small British garrison held off a Zulu force; eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded for the defence, seven of them to men of a single regiment, the 2nd/24th Foot. Neither tour's listing names a particular rock art site, so treat the paintings as something to ask about rather than something promised.

South Africa & Eswatini is nine nights. Its places include Johannesburg, the Drakensberg Mountains, Rorke's Drift, St Lucia, Eswatini, the Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, Kruger National Park, Graskop, the Blyde River Canyon and Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park.

Kruger, Eswatini and South Africa's Garden Route is twenty nights and covers much of the same ground in the east, including the Drakensberg Mountains, Rorke's Drift, St Lucia, Eswatini and Kruger National Park, before going on to Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula and Stellenbosch.

Whichever you choose, give the mountains a clear morning if you can. The cliffs are at their sharpest in early light, and the painted shelters, deep in shade under their overhangs, are cool places to sit and look at something people made here long before the dragon or the spears had their names.