The first evidence we have on Buffelskloof of early man’s presence here, is a crude Early Stone Age stone axe dating back from between 1.5 million and 200 000 years ago. These tools were part of what is known as the Acheulean industry and were fashioned by Homo erectus or very early Homo sapiens.

The first true humans to visit Buffelskloof were San hunter-gatherers (‘Bushmen’) who left little trace of their passing apart from a single rock painting of an eland made on a rock face in an overhang next to the stream below the Cottage. Many other paintings perhaps once existed, now obscured by rain-induced chemical deposits running down the rock faces.

Sometime between 1400 and 1700 AD, a group of Late Iron Age Nguni people, known as the Bokoni, settled in the Kloof. They constructed an extensive network of stone terraces on the slopes below the cliffs in the gorge, interspersed with numerous small settlements. The Nguni appear to have eventually been integrated with the Pedi tribes of the North Sotho and, by somewhere between 1820 and 1860, they had left the Kloof. Since all the terraces and their crops were of necessity in full sun, it can be assumed that all forest now occurring on the terraces dates from about 1840 AD.

An iron-smelting site was discovered on the Kloof’s western shoulder. Pieces of slag, as well as fragments of clay piping (above left) used to direct air, with the use of animal-skin bellows, into the furnace, have been recovered. The source of the iron appears to be heavily iron-impregnated quartzites. Five iron bangles (below left) recovered in the ruins within the Kloof are perhaps products of this furnace.

Although the bulk of the final actions of the Anglo-Boer conflict (1899–1902) took place to the west of Buffelskloof in the Kwena (Badfontein) basin, and to the north in the Long Tom Pass area, an exploded shell from the Boer Long Tom cannon (left) was found near the old sawmill near the north-west boundary of the Reserve. Boer womenfolk and children are also purported to have taken refuge in or on the margins of the Kloof during this latter episode of the War. 

To this end a small herbarium was built (1999) and the first accommodation (Clivia Cottage) was completed in 2001. In May 2008, an additional cottage, and a small conference room was completed (Aloe Cottage) and in October 2011 a much larger herbarium was opened, with Barbara Turpin employed as Herbarium Manager. John Rae officiated at the openings of both the first herbarium and Clivia Cottage but sadly passed away in 2005 before he could witness the Field Station grow, under the auspices of the Buffelskloof Nature Reserve Trust and, latterly, the funding assistance of the John Rae Trust, to the successful and internationally known resource that it is today.