Michell's Pass
R303, between Wolseley and Ceres
The 1848 gateway to Ceres and the old “highway to the north”, for decades the main road to the Diamond Fields, with its restored tollhouse still standing.
Michell's Pass was engineered by Andrew Geddes Bain and opened in 1848, replacing the perilous old Mostertshoek wagon track that had broken wheels and hearts since the 1760s. It was named for Colonel Charles Michell, the Cape Colony's Surveyor-General and Superintendent of Works, who championed the route.
From 1 January 1849 a tollkeeper collected dues at the whitewashed, thatched tollhouse near the Ceres end: so much for a loaded wagon, so much per hundred sheep. The pass mattered far beyond the valley: until the railway reached Kimberley in 1885, this was the main road to the Diamond Fields, part of the fabled highway to the north. The carefully restored tollhouse is a national monument.
The drive follows the Dwars River gorge through dramatic, almost lunar rock formations toward Ceres. The road was widened and rebuilt in 1988, but the old stonework, and the tollhouse, remain.