Maropeng’s new Stone Park

Maropeng’s new Stone Park was designed and completed by award-winning landscaping firm FSG late last year. It was a mammoth task that required careful planning and work, as it was being created in a World Heritage Site. Maropeng’s MD, Michael Worsnip, has written the following piece about the new addition to Maropeng’s landscape.

Parks are special places. Most of us live in a highly urbanized environment where space is limited and most of what we see around us is concrete. Maropeng is also a very special place, where we celebrate human achievement and development, from our earliest known ancestors to our present.

It is thus fitting that Stone Park is now part of the menu of options that we are proud to present to the public. It represents everything that is beautiful in nature, but it also represents, symbolically, what great things human beings can do.

A serene semi-circle of hewn Rustenburg granite presents the visitor, in a subtle and artistic way, with our human impact on the environment and how we have, down the millennia, turned natural places into functional spaces. Two giant granite stone tools at the entrance to the park speak to us of human endeavour and human industry. There is undoubtedly a connection between these primitive tools and our cellphones – that is, the extraordinary story of human development and how we craft our environment to suit our needs.

Stone Park is a beautiful space: a space to relax, to unwind, to celebrate, to party, to listen, to laugh, to enjoy. It is a space to contemplate our connection with the incredible span of human impact on our environment. It is a multifunctional space, to be used for picnics, for concerts, for weddings, for gatherings or for festivals.

We, as Maropeng, the official visitor centre for the Cradle of Humankind, are delighted and proud to be able to add such a wonderful new offering to our many existing ones.

We congratulate FSG and the remarkable team of creative thinkers that came up with the concept and the design for Stone Park. We cannot say we are surprised, because it is in the nature of human beings to do great and wonderful things.