Junction of Two Ley Lines
If you are driving between Cape Town and Montagu, you may be tempted to take a short detour to McGregor. It should be a humble little town: it has about a dozen untarred streets, maybe 100 homes on large plots, and a nice line of mountains curving pinkly into the middle-distance. But this is a country town with pretensions, and there’s something a little bit smug about McGregor.
Once McGregor was just a little outpost, famous for making the whip stocks used to control the oxen who, in turn, controlled the pace of colonisation. When the ox-wagon went the way of, well, the ox-wagon, McGregor was a town without an industry, and the town floundered for many years. Then it was ‘discovered’ that McGregor lies at the junction of two ley lines.
Ley lines are channels of natural energy that criss-cross the Earth. Locations where they intersect are supposed to be spiritually enriched, and these cosmic junctions have been associated with immemorial places like Stonehenge and Rustler’s Valley, near Clarens in the eastern Free State.
Lovely Drive
In McGregor, the convergence of ley lines has manifested itself in a host of wellness, healing and therapy centres. Massage treatments, mineral cleansing, karmic irrigations, shamanistic psychoanalysis and every other kind of alternative therapy is on offer in discrete spas and retreats all over town. Many Capetonians now own property in town so that they can be close to their crystals and, where Capetonians go, cheese and wine shops are soon to follow.
If stroking your karma isn’t your cup of herbal tea, a visit to McGregor can be enlivened with a lovely drive on the Road to Nowhere. This gravel road is actually a mountain pass that wasn’t. Originally intended to link McGregor with Greyton on the other side of the Riviersonderend Mountains, the road builders ran out of money halfway through. So, now the Road to Nowhere hits a dead-end in the cliffs about 13 km out of McGregor, at which point you have to turn around and head back to town. The scenery is luscious, but I don’t know if it’s worth going all the way to McGregor for a scenic cul-de-sac; unless you are already in town to have your aura serviced.