Although traditionally part of the Swartland, Darling is now a demarcated wine district and home to her own wine route, including five wine cellars all of which benefit from the cool breezes off the Atlantic Ocean and the long, hot summers to produce some stunning wines with concentrated flavour, depth and intensity.

Country Club is a links-type course, designed as a figure 8 winding around residential stands. Located on the unspoilt Cape west coast about 70 minutes drive from Cape Town, the elegant clubhouse offers panoramic views of the 15km (9.3 miles) long Langebaan lagoon, which is part of the West Coast National Park and Saldanha Bay harbour.

!Khwa ttu ('water pan') is an 850 Ha expression of the San kinship. This indigenous Southern African minority group has only 6700 San people living in South Africa today although genetic evidence places them as possibly the earth's first ever human inhabitants.

Contrary to the way the West Coast looks today, millions of years ago the area was dominated by riverine forests and wooded savanna, and animals that today are long extinct wandered the land. We know this because phosphate mining operations at Langebaan during the late 1950s exposed one of the richest fossil sites the world has ever seen, and since then the bones of some 200 different kinds of animals, some of them hitherto unknown to the world of science, have been recovered.

Just inland from the secluded harbour of Saldanha Bay one finds the azure waters of the Langebaan Lagoon, focal point of the West Coast National Park. Thousands of seabirds roost on sheltered islands, pristine golden beaches stretch endlessly into the early morning mist and brooding salt marshes are home to vast concentrations of migrant waders from the northern hemisphere.