Winter only hit us a week ago. Like everywhere else in the country we had become spoilt by the mild autumn temperatures caused, I understand, by a protective blanket of moisture in the lower atmosphere resulting from summer with it’s copious rains.

The front that came through last week finally swept all that before it, sucking in cold dry air. Every morning the pastures in the valley bottom are frosted a dull white and where the sprinklers were left running overnight it turns the pasture into a landscape size ice sculpture with the most amazing crystals forming all over. The famously warm middleveld winter middays just didn’t develop, especially if you went out of direct sunshine.

Yesterday was midwinter’s day, probably the only high day of the year when we need to envy the climate in the northern hemisphere. The thermometer in the car read 3.5 degrees and peeped a snow warning when I started out at our house at 7am yesterday. As I drove down the hill to the farmyard the reading went down half a degree every few hundred yards to reach -1,5 degrees at the dairy, no less than a 5 degree drop, as if all the cold from the highveld had settled down in the valley.

That is why in a valley such as this, people have always built halfway up the hillside. It is much warmer in winter than the valley bottom, and conversely cooler in summer.

The Crofts have thick walls, well insulated roofs, and north facing windows so they are naturally warm in this climate. But the best is the Morso stoves, lit in the early afternoon and fed slow burning saligna logs all evening. Add a glass or two of Port or a red wine, and suddenly midwinters night achieves an appeal all of it’s own.