Igloos In The Great Karoo

When trekboers entered the treeless Great Karoo in the early 1800s, they built dome-shaped houses out of stone. Some survive to this day. Mike Burgess explores these remarkable homes.

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In the early 1800s, a scarcity of quality timber for roof trusses forced trekboers in the Great Karoo to turn to the the region’s most ubiquitous building material, rock, and from this they constructed small, rondavel-like homes.

The building technique they used is called corbelling, and it was first employed in the Mediterranean approximately 4 000 years ago. Examples can still be found in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, Syria, and even Iceland and Greenland.

Nobody is sure how corbelling came to be mastered by the trekboers, but the technique might have been learnt in Europe and passed on to the trekboers or their forebears before they emigrated to Africa.

CORBELLING

A corbel is a projecting piece of stone that forms a bracket. In the process of building a circular corbelled roof, each row of stones is carefully laid on the inner edge of the previous layer, creating successively narrower circles and thus forming a cone-shaped structure. The remaining hole at the apex of the roof is then sealed using a single slab of rock.