Africa
Full Member
Yes my friend Ben and his two children as well as my beautiful wife Miche'le went out hunting last weekend, we visited an area known as Dordrecht, in this area during The Boer War there were a few fights between The British and Boers, however we were approac hed by the farm owner and The Museum from this town to hunt around and see what we can find for their museum as they do not have much on display to the public after all these years, thus written permission was first obtained from the farm owner and we went out with our 4x4 trucks for the weekend.The farmer offered us hi spare farm house to sleep in, normally during the cold winter months of this area, to camp in a tent would be very cold, this area has known to be minus 15 degrees celcius, thus we stayed in his spare house instead, okay there was no furniture in it, because if he left furnitire in it, it would be stolen, thus we just took along our mattrasses and wood for the wood stove in the kitchen, we had to make a fire in the stove to heat up water for the bathroom and also the heat from the stove warmed up the section of the house that we stayed in.
Okay the first day when we went out hunting, we stopped at the base of this huge mountain called Mount Victory, it was too steep to go any futher, thus we stopped at this huge rock that must have rolled down off the mountain a few years ago, see how it has split in two and there is still a smaller rock balancing ontop of the split section.
The white Toyota Hilux truck on the left is my 4x4.
So we got ourselves ready, it was 11am in the morning, packed in some bottles of cooldrink and took our machines out of the trucks as well as the spades and started our trek to the top of the mountain, the going was very tough, steep and we basically had to follow cattle and sheep tracks, we basically zigzagged our way to the top, each time we reached a higher rdige we thought we were at the top, however it took us over an hour to reach the top, which was excellent going, pushing ourselves to the top, the previous weekend there had in fact been snow up this mountain, but that day it was in fact still quiet cold but bearable, at the top of the mountain there is a beacon marker, the wind was blowing very strongly, in fact it was not nice up there, however during The Boer War, the top of this mountain was used by The British as a Heliograph outpost, must have been terrible for the soldiers to stay up there all the time.
We started to search around and the first item that we found was some soft walled Martini Henry doppies, the term doppie means that the bullet has in fact been shot off and only the cartdride is left, we then found lots of 303 doppies, in fact in one hole I found over 30 of them, there must have been a sniper sitting behind this rock shooting down towards The Boers below.
We also found some rustly old tin bully beef and biscuit cans.
We then made our way down the mountain in a different direction and soon came across some rock fortifications, this is where The Boers must have been fighting from, in this area we found many Martini Henry soft and hard walled doppies, as well as one Mauzer doppie and a few unique very rare Guedes doppies, these Guedes bullets were used in a snipers rifle, there were not many of them made, we also found a few "trench art items, basically from boredom, the boer soldiers stuck doppie bullets into each other, they also bent them over and made various things from them, a few miletery buttons were also found as well as horse shoes.
Here are the soft walled Martini Henry doppies, they were manufactured before the hard walled doppies, from round about 1850 to 1860.
The British had two 15 pounder cannons as well as two 7 pound cannons, The Boers had one 12 Pond cannon, thus these cannons were also used during these fights and we are still searching for where they were used, will ahve to go back again to find this area, we have had various historical people input as well concerning where they were used.
Once I have completed the two display cases, I will show you all, these are the cases that are been donated to the museum and farm owner.
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I wish people would stop killing eachother.... 
