When Lady Anne Barnard first set eyes on Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain in July 1797 she was – like generations of travelers after her – instantly transfixed. Less than a month later she resolved to hike to the top, to go ‘where no white woman had ever been.’ At 6am Lady Anne and a party of European men and slaves set off, she wearing her husband’s trousers and with rope tied over her shoes for traction. Even today, with modern equipment and a road to the trailhead, the hike is no doddle. But Barnard was not one to focus on the negatives: ‘To feel the pure air raising up…gave me a sort of unembodied feeling such as I conceive the Soul to have.’

At the top, after painting a few (very accomplished) watercolors and collecting some plant specimens, she ate a hot supper of ‘at least a dozen snipes’ and even tried the slaves’ fish curry – something she vowed never to repeat due to its ‘unaccountable singularity.’ Later that night, in a tent pitched at the summit, she and her husband ‘found a good bed on which two hearts reposed themselves which were truly grateful for all the blessings conferred on them.’

Lady Anne Lindsay (her maiden name) was born in 1750, the eldest child of a Scottish Earl. She grew up to be a beautiful, talented (one of her ballads was set to music by Joseph Haydn) and fiercely independent woman. Her family, who had plenty of titles but little money, thought they could marry her off to swell the coffers. But in spite of the attention of numerous suitors she said no every time. Disgruntled by Scotland’s insular social scene, she moved down to London where she got involved with high society – which loved her for being the life and soul of any party. She took numerous prominent lovers before falling heavily in love with William Windham, ‘a real bad egg who treated her terribly,’ says Stephen Taylor, author Defiance: The life and choices of Lady Anne Barnard.

In 1791, at the height of the revolution she went over to France to see what all the fuss was about, before returning to London and continuing to turn down marriage proposals. By the time she finally married Andrew Barnard, an obscure soldier 12 years her junior, she was 43. Tired of being the centre of scandal in London she was able to use her influence to find a position for Andrew in far-off Cape Town.

Although she spent less than five years at the Cape, there seems to be little doubt that it was the happiest time of her life. She and Andrew were deeply in love (that they had no children was ‘not for want of sex,’ says Taylor) and she thrived in the simple setting of Cape Town where, then even more than now, nature was ever present. In the early years, the Barnards spent a lot of time at Paradise ‘a little government cottage at the bottom of the mountain…which Lord Macartney has given us to be rural in.’ This was typical Barnard, says Taylor: ‘She loved throwing parties, but she also liked getting away from it all.’

In 1798 the Barnards embarked on a voyage into the interior, a 700-mile trip undertaken on ox wagons, that convinced her of the Cape’s amazing potential as a bread basket – something which the powers that be would not see for decades. On the trip she wrote and painted furiously, marveling at the hospitality of the Dutch farmers and at the sincerity of a church service at a simple mission station: ‘I doubt much whether I should have entered St. Peters at Rome …with a more awed impression of the deity and his presence than I did this little Church of a few feet Square, where the simple disciples of Christianity dressed in the skins of animals knew no purple or fine linen, no pride … no hypocrisy.’

In 1800 the Barnards built The Vineyard, the first English country house in South Africa and now one of Cape Town’s more prestigious hotels, in what were then the rural farmlands of Newlands. There she lived, keeping antelope and telling anyone who would listen about the wonders of South Africa, until her return to London in January 1802 when control of the colony passed into Dutch hands.

Dutch rule lasted less than five years, and in 1807 Andrew Barnard returned to the Cape for a temporary posting. A few months later he died, aged only 47. Anne was devastated by his death, describing it as a sorrow ‘not to be soon got the better of.’ When she discovered that he had had an illegitimate child by a slave woman, she did the unthinkable and transported the child, whose name was Christina, back to London to raise as her own. Before her own death in 1825, Anne secured Christina a good dowry that enabled her to marry into a prominent farming family in Wiltshire.

‘What Anne Barnard did with Christina was most extraordinary for the time and very brave,’ says Taylor. ‘But that was who she was. She was a woman for our time, a one-off…an aristocrat and a rebel, who wanted to live independently. Her values were so against the current of the day…I became, I have to confess, somewhat infatuated by her.’

Lady Anne Barnard was also one of South Africa’s first whistleblowers. Learn about this aspect of her life in this podcast, or in Chapter 2 of Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in South Africa.