Map guru Peter Slingsby's love letter to the Cederberg

For half a century, Peter Slingsby has been quietly mapping not just mountains, but meaning. His new volume, Cederberg: The Book, feels like the natural culmination of that life’s work – a rich, layered act of devotion that is equal parts memoir, cultural history, hiking guide, ecological record and love letter to one of South Africa’s most evocative landscapes.

Slingsby’s writing opens with a declaration of allegiance: the Cederberg is, above all, about its rocks. He gives us geology as poetry – “red rocks, flaming in the sunset, flaring at dawn” – and then guides us through aeons of geological drama, from glacier-laid tillite to sandstone arches and cathedral cliffs. This is no dry textbook, but an invitation to look again, to slow down and let the land’s deep time work its spell.

The book is divided into sections that flow like a hike: beginning with the land and its people, then Slingsby’s own history in the Cederberg, before branching into flora, fauna, rock art, and the cedar trees themselves – those embattled, iconic survivors that give the range its name.

People and memory

The early chapters balance geological time with human time, tracing the layered presence of the /Xam and Khoi, the arrival of colonists, the ensuing conflicts, and the erasures and survivals that followed. Slingsby writes with empathy for the first peoples whose lives and cosmologies were tied to these valleys, and whose rock art galleries still whisper their presence.

His accounts of /Xam extermination, settler outposts and forgotten graves are told without sensationalism but with deep moral weight – reminding readers that this mountain wilderness is also a site of memory and mourning.

Crucially, he resists treating the Cederberg as empty wilderness. Place names, for Slingsby, are living fossils: markers of language, story, and event. His decades-long project to recover these names – interviewing elders in Heuningvlei, Witwater, and the Bokkeveld, combing through archives – is one of the book’s most moving achievements. We learn about Sitkoppie, where villagers met on Sundays; about Moordenaarsgat (Murderer’s Hollow), a cleft in the land that carries a memory of violence; and about the hundreds of other names that might have been lost if not for this painstaking work.

A life on the trails

The middle section, My Years in the Cederberg, is perhaps the heart of the book. Slingsby recounts his first trip as a teenager – that moment when dawn light on the crags “hooked” him for life – and the decades of hiking, mapping and exploring that followed. These chapters read like fireside storytelling: funny, affectionate, sometimes melancholy. We meet foresters, mountain guides and local characters; we share campfire suppers and icy swims; we learn how he and his wife Maggie carried children and dogs into the mountains and slowly, patiently, turned their passion into a profession.

The chapter on mapping is a delight for anyone who loves the craft of cartography. Slingsby describes the shift from hand-drawn maps with Letraset lettering to GPS-based precision, recounting how he and field assistant Matthew Britton criss-crossed the Cederberg on foot, logging every trail and taking more than 26,000 photographs to build what is still the most detailed hiking map of the region. The result was not just a tool for navigation, but a cultural document – a map that feels alive, because it was walked into existence.

Flora, fauna and rock art

Slingsby is as attentive to the non-human residents of the Cederberg as he is to its human history. His chapters on flora and spring flowers celebrate the subtlety of the Shale Band fynbos, the rarity of the snow protea, and the seasonal carpets of daisies that draw visitors from across the country. The fauna section is equally generous, giving space to leopards, baboons, and antelopes – not as checklist species, but as participants in the ongoing drama of this mountain range.

Rock art, too, is given careful treatment. Slingsby writes with reverence about the /Xam artists whose ochre and white figures still dance on the sandstone walls. He explains their motifs – the hook-headed hunters, the eland and trance dances – but also urges readers to approach these sites with respect, as fragile, irreplaceable archives.

Adventure 

For climbers and adventurers, there is plenty here to enjoy. The chapter on climbing history is packed with anecdotes, from Thomas Maclear’s 1843 ascent of Sneeukop to the Mountain Club’s annual camps and the boom in “trad” climbing and bouldering that put the Cederberg on the global climbing map. Slingsby honours the pioneers, but also acknowledges the tensions between recreation and conservation – a theme that runs through the book like a guiding contour line.

Cedars in trouble

The final section, The Cedars: Losing or Winning? is perhaps the book’s most urgent. Slingsby details the long history of exploitation that brought Widdringtonia cedarbergensis to the brink – from telegraph-pole logging in the 1880s to failed plantation schemes and human-induced fires – before turning to modern efforts at conservation and replanting. He does not sugar-coat the challenges, but there is hope here: young trees are being planted, fires are better managed and researchers are piecing together strategies for survival.

What makes Cederberg: The Book so compelling is the way it mirrors Slingsby’s maps. It is detailed without being overwhelming, passionate without being sentimental, and always aware that to know a place is to walk it, name it, and care for it. The photographs – many taken by Slingsby and his collaborators – are superb, from glowing rockscapes to intimate portraits of flora. The design is clean and inviting, encouraging both dipping in and long, fireside reading sessions.

Peter Slingsby has given us more than a book: he has given us a guided walk through the mountains that shaped him. We come away with a sense not only of where the trails and passes lie, but of the stories, struggles and ecologies that make the Cederberg what it is.

For hikers, climbers, historians, botanists, or anyone who has ever stood under the Wolfberg Arch at sunset and felt very small, this is essential reading. And for those who have never been – this book may well be the spark that sends you packing your rucksack and heading north to see the red rocks for yourself. DM