“A stone wall out of the earth that thundering cannon cannot destroy"? Bastion and Moat at the Castle,Cape Town

Although the urgency with which the Dutch East India Company administration at the Cape built defensive works was a direct result of their fear of attack from both land and sea, there was an additional imperative, for the Castle at Cape Town stood as a symbol of Dutch colonial aspirations. In this paper, we compare written and material texts of one part of the Castle's architecture to show firstly, how the discordances between such sources can reveal an underside of early colonization and secondly, how the Castle moat, in the seventeenth century a stamp of aspirant power, was by the mid‐nineteenth century a dump and a public nuisance.