Celebrating Tradition, Limewash and History

There is something about limewashing an old house that makes you feel you are participating in a ritual rather than simply doing maintenance.

As winter begins to loosen its grip and the first promise of spring appears along the Breede River, we find ourselves looking at the old buildings of Towerwater with a slightly different eye. The winter rains have left their marks. The walls have softened in colour, the edges have gathered a little dust and weather, and here and there the old limewash has begun to show the years beneath.

It is time to limewash, and it is not glamorous work. There are buckets, brushes, splashes on the ground and white fingerprints everywhere. There is the particular smell of wet lime, earthy and clean, and the constant business of stirring the mixture because limewash has a mind of its own. It settles, separates and demands to be woken up again.

But once the first brushful goes onto an old wall, something happens. The building begins to come alive.

At Towerwater, this is especially moving because the walls are not merely walls. They carry the marks of the people who built them, repaired them, leaned against them, swept their floors and opened their doors to the seasons. They are made in the old Cape way, of earth, clay, stone, lime and all the imperfect materials that belonged to a time when a building was made from what could be found nearby.

You can feel that history in the surface. A modern wall wants to be smooth and perfect. An old wall has no such ambition. It bows slightly in the afternoon light. It carries a little unevenness beneath the brush. There are places where the plaster is thicker, places where the earth beneath seems almost to breathe through the surface, and small repairs that tell their own quiet story.

Limewash suits such walls. It doesn't try to conceal them. It settles into their imperfections and makes them beautiful.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about watching a white wall appear beneath a brush. The colour is almost startling when it is wet, grey and cold, but as it dries it becomes softer, chalkier and warmer. The rough places catch the light. The old pebbledash takes on a new life, each little stone showing itself for a moment before becoming part of the whole again.

And then there is the sun. The Cape sun has always had a way of making white buildings glow. On a late winter morning, freshly limewashed walls can seem almost too bright to look at. By afternoon, the light has softened and the buildings settle back into the landscape: white against the green, old walls beneath blue sky, the whole place looking somehow both freshly renewed and exactly as it ought to be.

Perhaps that is what I like most about limewashing. It is renewal without erasure. You don't scrape away every trace of the past. You don't try to make an old building look new. You simply give it another coat, another season of protection, another chance to face the weather.

And underneath the new limewash are all the earlier layers. Somewhere beneath our brush are the coats put on by hands long gone. There may be limewash from decades ago, perhaps repairs made by people whose names we will never know. The wall has been whitened before, and before that, and before that.

We are only adding our own thin layer to the story. There is a rhythm to the work, dip the brush, let the excess run back into the bucket, brush across the wall, step back, look, move the ladder, start again.

After a while, you stop thinking about the work itself. You notice the sounds around you: the birds, the wind moving through the trees, perhaps a tractor somewhere in the distance. You notice how the morning becomes warmer. You notice the smell of the earth after rain.

And occasionally, you stop altogether. Because standing in front of an old Cape building with a brush in your hand is a curious way of understanding time.

The people who built these places knew that buildings needed looking after. They did not expect walls to remain untouched. Limewash was part of the life of the house. It was maintenance, protection and appearance all at once.

The walls are renewed, ready for a new cycle of seasons. In a world increasingly obsessed with making things permanent, limewashing reminds us that some things are meant to be renewed.

The old walls don't resist it. They accept the fresh lime quietly, just as they have accepted the rain, the dust, the heat and the years. By the time we finish, the brushes are tired, our clothes have acquired their own white decorations, and there is lime on places where lime was never intended to be. But the buildings look wonderful. Not new, never new, just cared for.

The late-winter light catches the freshly whitened walls, and for a little while Towerwater looks as though it has stepped out of an old photograph: white gables, rough walls, green trim and that particular Cape brightness that seems to belong to another age.

Then the wind comes up from the river. The trees move. A bird calls from somewhere beyond the buildings, and we put the buckets away until next time. Because that, too, is part of the tradition.

The old buildings endure, not because time has left them untouched, but because generation after generation has taken the trouble to care for them in the traditional way. And there is something rather comforting in knowing that, for one small part of their long history, we have done the same.