The new Ford Everest Sport was recently launched on the Swartberg Pass, one of Thomas Bain’s most iconic road engineering achievements.
At its highest point, the Swartberg Pass, just outside the picturesque hamlet of Prince Albert, is 1,583m above sea level. Known as “the Rubicon of gravel road passes”, it was also South Africa’s most prolific road builder, Thomas Bain’s final – and what many experts agree was his pièce de résistance – feat of road building in the Western Cape.
Nicknamed “the man with the theodolite eye” for his uncanny ability to figure out the perfect route up a mountain with the naked eye, Bain is credited with building many of South Africa’s magnificent mountain passes. (A theodolite is a surveying instrument with a rotating telescope for measuring horizontal and vertical angles.) According to legend, in his 46 years of employment at the Public Works Department, Bain only ever…