The Delville Wood Crosses

Origin Story

Between July 15 and 20, 1916, the South African Infantry Brigade was ordered to take and hold Delville Wood on the Somme. They held it through six days of shelling that reduced the wood to splinters, at a cost recorded as 2,416 men killed, wounded, or missing. After the war, the brigade's commander, General Henry Lukin, brought timber home from a Scots pine that had survived on the shattered battlefield, and memorial crosses were cut from the wood. Two stand at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, one mounted on the outer curtain wall and one within. Another went to Pietermaritzburg, where it stood with the Natal Carbineers before being moved in 1956 to the Garden of Remembrance on Leinster Road, in the care of the Memorable Order of Tin Hats.

Evidence & Claims

The mystery belongs to the Pietermaritzburg sister. Almost every year, in the days around the battle's anniversary in mid-July, sticky reddish resin seeps from that cross, and its custodians and the city's press have documented the weeping for decades; in the centenary July of 2016 it wept on schedule. The Cape Town crosses, cut from the same tree, have never been reported to weep. Investigations attributed over the years to forestry researchers and the University of Natal produced no accepted explanation for why one piece of the pine mourns and its siblings do not, and a 2024 proposal to relocate the weeping cross drew public fury, a measure of what the object has come to mean.

Skeptical Explanations

Dead pine wood can exude resin for a long time, and temperature and humidity swings can move it; that much is ordinary. The strangeness lives in the timing, since July is midwinter in KwaZulu-Natal, when resin flow should be at its laziest, and in the selectivity, since wood from the same tree hangs dry on a Cape Town wall. The precision of the schedule rests on custodian and press records rather than instrumented study, so the sober verdict is: unexplained, imperfectly measured, and faithfully repeating, which is more than most relics can claim.

The Castle of Good Hope is open daily, roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an entry fee; the Delville Wood crosses can be seen on and within the castle walls. If you are chasing the weeping itself, the sister cross stands in the MOTH Garden of Remembrance on Leinster Road, Pietermaritzburg, and the anniversary window of 15 to 20 July is when the resin appears; a contested 2024 proposal to relocate that cross means it is worth confirming its location before a long trip. Both sites are war memorials: visit respectfully.