Hill or Valley?
A geological curiosity, the Valley of Desolation about five kilometres southeast of Graaff-Reinet is a valley dominated by 100-metre rock columns. If you want to sound like a geologist, call it basalt from the Beaufort Series of the Karoo System that dates back some 180-million years and reaches a thickness of nearly 700 metres.
You won’t be the first person to wonder why a hill was named a valley, but such things sometimes just happen. My guess is that it was named for the view you get from the summit of this Karoo koppie, what geographers call a butte, that stands on the outskirts of Graaff-Reinet in the Camdeboo National Park, pretending to the entire world that it really is in Arizona, you know like those old cowboy movies.
The ‘valley' is one of thousands of flat-topped hills that define the Karoo. They are, in fact, remnants of an ancient landscape, formed when Africa broke away from the other southern continents, a period of erosion, that is still ongoing, set in. These hills were once of hardened underground lava, now protruding as hills after the softer rocks of the Karoo Supergroup have been sanded and washed away.
By David Bristow