Walking the Hermanus Cliff Path in 360°: Mossel River to Kraal Rock (Part 1)

There are days on the Hermanus cliff path when Walker Bay feels almost close enough to touch. Our latest Table and Tide outing was one of those – a 360° walk from Mossel River to Kraal Rock, filmed with the Hermanus Botanical Society. This is Part 1 of the route; in a future instalment we’ll keep heading east from Kraal Rock along this legendary trail.

Walking with the Botanical Society means you don’t just see the coast – you learn to read it. On this stretch the path threads between flowering fynbos and low cliffs, with the sea working away at rock platforms and old fishing ledges below. Some of the Society members appear in the video as we pass each other and chat on the way back, a reminder that the Cliff Path is still very much a community project, even after all these years.

From fishermen’s tracks to a community-built trail

Long before there was a formal coastal path, Hermanus locals were already wearing narrow tracks through the coastal scrub. By the late 19th century, fishermen had carved out steep little footpaths from the main road straight down to their favourite rocky ledges and pools, each route chosen for the most direct scramble to the water. Visitors followed these same paths to watch the sea and, later, the whales.

The idea of linking all those fishermen’s tracks into a single continuous cliff walk only arrived in 1960, when Eric Jones, a former RAF airman who had settled in Hermanus after World War II, pitched it at a meeting of the newly formed Hermanus Botanical Society. The Society backed him immediately and set to work.

Wild Pelargonium — A wild Pelargonium (fynbos geranium)

Rain spiders nest, within lies the mother and the eggs which when they hatch will be set free. — A wild Pelargonium (fynbos geranium)

What followed was a kind of pre-crowdfunding experiment. There was no municipal budget for a leisure trail, so the route was cleared and built almost entirely through community effort: donations collected through the Botanical Society, local fundraising, and a small team of labourers working alongside volunteers like Jones and Dr Ion Williams. Over about five years, they stitched the old fisherman’s descents together into a single path hugging the cliffs as closely as possible. Only later did the municipality adopt the Cliff Path as a public asset.

Today, the trail runs for roughly 12 km from the New Harbour in the west to the mouth of the Klein River in the east, fully incorporated into the Fernkloof Nature Reserve and maintained by the Cliff Path Management Group, the municipality and a network of donors and volunteers.

Mossel River to Kraal Rock: a classic Hermanus section

The Mossel River–Kraal Rock section we walked and filmed for this episode is one of the Cliff Path’s most beloved pieces. It’s wheelchair-friendly in parts, rich in birdlife, and gives access to some of the classic whale-watching viewpoints when the southern rights arrive between June and November.

Kraal Rock itself is a natural lookout – a solid block of stone facing the full sweep of Walker Bay. From here you can read much of the town’s story in a single panorama: the original fishing harbour, the later hotels and tidal pools, and the thread of the path linking old and new.

View north West from the wooden bridge over the Mossel River in Hermanus. — Mossel River Hermanus©Table&Tide

A contested pool and a path reclaimed

That story is still being written. One of the most significant recent chapters involves a privately built swimming pool and terrace at Bayview Apartments, which were found to encroach on public coastal land and block the completion of a continuous Cliff Path. After years of activism by the Cliff Path Action Group and local residents, the Western Cape High Court ruled that the pool and entertainment area sit on public property below the high-water mark, clearing the way for the path to be completed and confirming that this stretch of coastline belongs to everyone.

The court decision is part of a broader push to finish the remaining “missing link” in the route, creating a fully connected 12 km coastal walkway from New Harbour to Grotto Beach – a project driven once again by volunteers, donations and partnerships between civil society and local government.

This 360° walk from Mossel River to Kraal Rock is our way of documenting that living history – a path born from fishermen’s tracks, community whip-rounds and stubborn activism, still evolving with each court case, work party and wildflower season.

Part 2 will follow the trail westwards from Kraal Rock. In the meantime, you can watch Part 1 on the Table and Tide channel, wander the virtual path in 360°, and maybe plan your own walk along the real one.