The Swartberg range runs roughly east to west across South Africa's Western Cape, forming a wall between two very different landscapes. To the south lies the Little Karoo, a semi-arid valley of ostrich farms and vineyards sheltered between mountain ranges. To the north stretches the Great Karoo, a vast, dry hinterland that extends deep into the South African interior. For centuries, this mountain barrier kept the two regions apart. The Khoi-San people who lived in the valleys on both sides undoubtedly made crossings, but their routes went unrecorded by European settlers. In 1800, a farmer named Petrus Johannes Meiring became the first person to make a recorded crossing at this point in the range, picking his way along the Groote Stroom river from his farm near De Rust. Together with Gerome Marincowitz, a farmer from the northern side, Meiring carved out a bridle path narrow enough to make mules nervous and wide enough to make a handful of intrepid travelers attempt it.

The pass owes its existence to a horseback expedition in August 1854. John Molteno, an Italian immigrant farmer who had just won election to represent the Great Karoo in the new Cape Parliament, set out from Beaufort West with the road engineers Thomas and Andrew Geddes Bain and a friend, Charles Pritchard. The four riders spent days exploring the Swartberg's valleys and ridges, evaluating possible routes. The Bains preferred a more eastern crossing at Toorwater Poort, which would have been easier to build but lay 50 kilometers off the desired line, adding four or five days to every journey. Molteno's subsequent report to Parliament chose the current route instead. In 1856 a select committee allocated funds, and crucially, the project employed paid laborers rather than convict labor, a practice common at the time. The goal was ambitious: connect the underdeveloped Karoo hinterland with the port at Mossel Bay, opening an export route for the wool and livestock that were the region's economic lifeblood.

Construction began in August 1856 under the supervision of Adam de Schmidt, with the Bains overseeing the project. The budget was 5,000 pounds, widely dismissed as inadequate, but the final cost came in at just 5,018 pounds, a feat of fiscal discipline that modern infrastructure projects might envy. Andrew Geddes Bain developed a technique on this project that revolutionized road building in the Cape Colony. Rather than blasting through the massive boulders blocking the route, he piled freshly cleared vegetation on the rock and set it alight. The intense heat cracked the stone, and dousing it with cold water afterward completed the fracture. Blasting became rarely necessary. For his son Thomas, then a young engineer, Meiringspoort was a first major project and the beginning of a legendary career building passes across southern Africa. The entire 16-kilometer road was completed in just 223 working days. On 3 March 1858, a procession of 50 carts, 12 wagons, and 300 horsemen crossed the pass for the first time. Andrew Bain suggested naming it for Petrus Meiring, the farmer who had first blazed the trail.

The pass worked. Mossel Bay's port had to be expanded almost immediately to handle the surge in exports pouring through the Swartberg. By the 1870s, one-eighth of the entire Cape Colony's wool exports traveled this route, despite the constant need for flood repairs on a road that crossed its river two dozen times. The Swartberg itself gained recognition as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its geological formations now protected as a treasure of global significance. Tucked along the gorge about 15 kilometers from the southern entrance sits a more whimsical piece of heritage: the Herrieklip, a sandstone boulder into which the poet C. J. Langenhoven carved the name 'Herrie' in 1929. Herrie was a fictional circus elephant from Langenhoven's satirical novels, a character beloved enough that the stone bearing his name was declared a national monument in 1973. It is the kind of detail that captures something essential about Meiringspoort: a place where geological grandeur and human eccentricity coexist in a gorge barely wide enough for a two-lane road.