TOPIC:

Well, I think I'll simply go with the few old maps I have and continue to call it Spion Kop, or merely "The Kop" which I like!

Brett Hendey wrote: Frank
Probably since 1838 when the ancestors of the 1899-1902 Boers used its summit to get a panoramic view of what they had hoped would be their 'promised land'.
Brett

PS The Zulu name for Spioen Kop is 'Ntabamnyama' (= 'Black Mountain'), which may well replace 'Spioen Kop' in the New South Africa.

Brett Hendey wrote: Meurig
I had already thought of that complication, but perhaps the cartographers of that time simply misunderstood what they were told by local Zulus. As far as I have been able to discover there is not another Zulu name applied to Spioen Kop, and it certainly deserves a name, since it is the most prominent topographic feature over a wide area east of the Drakensberg.
Brett.

"perhaps" - they certainly were confused! Poor maps were a feature of the Buller relief campaign. It would be interesting if such features did get renamed and in the process cartographic "errors" committed by the British (and Boers) got corrected. We would need Frank's old maps to make any sense of the histories.

Now, if all these places had lat/long attached...........Do you think the ANC would fiddle with lat/long?

Brett Hendey wrote: A small point ......... 'Spion Kop' is correctly 'Spioen Kop', and it is pronounced 'spee-oon'. I do not know how to indicate the correct pronunciation of 'Kop', but the anglicised 'cop' is incorrect.
Brett

Anglicised in the same way that British soldiers in WW1 had Wipers (Ypres) and Plugstreet (Ploegsteert).

Chaps
Herewith (with any luck) is a pic of "Spion Kop" as viewed from the road leading to/from Woy Woy, New South Wales. I say "with any luck" as I have just had a new system installed and there are a few crossed fingers here.
Regards to all
IL.

Some place names from the ABW era have been modified since. The railway station at Paardeberg, which houses the battlefield museum, is now called Perdeberg. Another example is Naauwpoort in the old Cape Colony which is frequently referenced in ABW histories and is now called Noupoort. There is another Naauwpoort in the north of the country which retains the original spelling.

One thing that iritates me instensely is the frequent mis-spelling of battles in articles and publications by people who should know better including Paardeburg, Dreifontein and Wittenbergen. How anyone presuming to write on the ABW can make such glaring basic errors is beyond me. (Medal News is a prime example ).

There is a road called Spitzkop in the picturesque South Wales village of Llantwit Major. I have no idea how it came to be given this name though.

David

"Spion Kop is a small residential and former industrial area in Nottinghamshire, England stretching for a few hundred yards on both sides of the main A60 road surrounded by open farmland.

It is located about a mile to the south of Warsop on the A60, Mansfield Road. It is a settlement built and named after the Battle of Spion Kop which took place during the Second Boer War in Natal, South Africa in January 1900. A major military figure in the conflict was John Talbot Coke, grandson of D'Ewes Coke, born at Mansfield Woodhouse, a well-known Nottinghamshire industrialist and clergyman."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spion_Kop,_Nottinghamshire

This makes me think that there must have been someone connected with both the battle of Spion Kop and the farm in Wigtoft for it to have been so named.