Sites

A cemetery consisting of approximately 20 graves is located here. It is situated on Portion 9 of the farm Platterug 303 owned by Mr C van den Berg and is located approximately 190 m south-east of the farmhouse at Site 10. According to oral history, members of the Potgieter family are buried in this cemetery (Lemmer, pers. comm.) (Van den Berg, pers. comm.). Mr Carel Lemmer, the owner of certain portions of the farm Oak Hill and who has been living in this general area for the past 70 years, indicates that over the years he has personally attended the funerals of two members of the Potgieter family at this cemetery. The cemetery is fenced with bonox wire, approximately 20 m x 10 m in extent and is densely overgrown. The
landowner Mr Van Den Berg was most helpful and instructed a staff member to clear the vegetation from the site to
allow for better assessment and identification. Once this was done it was possible to establish that at least five of the
graves are covered by joined brick and mortar enclosed dressings with the remainder comprising rudimentary stone
heaps. An interesting observation to be made from the orientation of the joined grave dressings is that they are
aligned to the north-south axis and not along the east-west axis as is the usual practice. The five joined graves share inner brick and cement walls and have the same rudimentary headstone consisting of a pyramid of bricks covered in cement. Each of these joined grave dressings is roughly 180 cm long and 340 cm wide, and although this is unusually large for adult grave dressings, the dressings are not large enough to be for double graves. No names or dates of life are indicated on any of these dressings. A number of shells were observed on and in proximity to the graves. It appears that these shells were placed on the graves by family members.