Fort Michel, Not Mitchell
On the hillside below Tor Doone, overlooking the valley that runs down toward Alice, lies a weathered stone outline in the grass. Easy to miss, impossible to forget once found: the earthwork of a British fort. Nothing stands there now, and on a misty day you might walk right past it. Yet the plaque beside it insists on a declared National Monument, even if it can’t spell his name.
Welcome to Fort Michel. One L, after Colonel John Michel, whose name the fort carries. Google says Fort Mitchell, the 1982 plaque says Fort Michell, and both are wrong. The road signs get it right. All three, naturally, are sure of themselves.
The story starts with a stolen axe.
In March 1846 a Xhosa man was arrested on the eastern frontier for stealing an axe. His comrades freed him in a rescue that left a man dead, the chiefs refused to hand the rescuers over, and the whole frontier went up. The Seventh Frontier War is remembered as the War of the Axe, and burned into 1847.
To finish it, the British sent the 6th (Royal Warwickshire) Regiment to the Cape in August 1846, and with it comes our first officer: John Michel. Lieutenant-colonel commanding the 6th since 1842, he followed his regiment out in 1847 for the axe war’s last months, and when the next frontier war broke out in 1850 his men held this ground, fighting at Waterkloof and Mount Chaco. Sir George Cathcart’s despatch names “the two stationary camps of Colonels Michel (Hogsback) and Eyre (Keiskammahoek)”: the man was right here, camped on this ridge, in the early 1850s. The village’s own historian, Trevor Webster, adds that Colonel Michel was in charge of the troops at Fort Beaufort, and hands him both the fort and Michel’s Pass down to Seymour.
And the axe? Never seen again. If your kid finds one up there, blame the cattle hand and keep walking.
Now the second officer, and he is the problem. Charles Cornwallis Michell. Two L’s. Royal Artillery man, Surveyor-General of the Cape, the fellow behind Sir Lowry’s and the Montagu Pass. Everyone at the Cape knew his name, which is exactly the trouble. One thing disqualifies him from our fort: he left the Cape in 1848 and died in 1851, just as our earthwork was being thrown up. Splendid man. Wrong fort.
Picture the village, naming the fort of the Michel who camped above it, while the famous Michell is on everyone’s tongue. “Michel” and “Mitchell” sound the same in English. Ears hear what they know, and pens write what ears hear. The same drift had already happened to the same name, in the same colony, in the same century: the pass at Ceres named for Charles Michell is Michell’s Pass, and the record admits it was “originally Mitchell’s pass, using an incorrect spelling of his surname.”
Then, in 1982, the National Monuments Council put up the plaque. Their researchers got every hard fact right. The fort was built in the early 1850s to protect the approaches to Fort Hare, the post 220 troops fell back on when the next war opened in December 1850. They named the right man, Lt.-Col. Sir John Michel of the 6th, later Field Marshal (March 1886, dead two months later; not an attendance award). Even the garrison’s 1858 withdrawal sits in the right window.
And then, one imagines, the flawless wording went to the sign maker, and somewhere between desk and casting mould, one extra L crawled in. FORT MICHELL. The soldier’s story in the surveyor’s spelling, set in bronze, read aloud and copied ever since. The village’s own Piggy Trails booklet was saying FORT MITCHELL decades ago, and today Google will happily direct you to a Fort Mitchell no person was ever named.
Neither officer, for the record, was ever called Mitchell. It is nobody’s surname.
If you go, know the fort sits on forestry land and you need a permit: weekends at the permit office in Oak Avenue at the Arboretum entrance, weekdays at the Forestry office 200m up Main Road, or so the locals say. What you’ll find is not much to look at and everything to think about: a soft rectangle in the grass, a bronze plate with one letter too many, and the view the Colonel picked the hill for.
History isn’t always filed away in a sterile archive. Sometimes it lives out in the open, weathering on a plaque or echoing off a road sign. The earthwork is real, old and protected. The plaque got the hard facts right and fumbled one letter. And the fort is called Fort Michel. The rest is just what happens when a French surname tries to survive in an English-speaking village.
