In the early years of European settlement at the Cape, an unbroken wall of mountains running north to south cut Cape Town off from the interior. Only three routes permitted the passage of ox-wagons through this barrier: Gantouw Kloof in the south, Piekenierskloof Pass some 170 kilometers to the north, and the Roodezand Pass roughly midway between them. Potter's overland route, about four kilometers north of Gouda, became the middle option. For forty years after his 1658 expedition, nothing was done to improve it. When Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel decided in 1699 to open the valley for farming, the pass's eastern slopes proved so steep that wagons had to be dismantled entirely -- carried piece by piece over the mountain on the backs of cattle and their drivers.

By the 1750s, the overland route had become exhausting, and the farmers of the area decided to attempt what Potter could not: a road through the river gorge itself. Under the leadership of Jacobus du Toit, they pushed a route along the eastern bank of the Klein Berg River. Because it followed the water's course, the new road had no steep gradients and quickly became the preferred passage. To distinguish the two routes, the old one became Oudekloof and the new one Nieuwekloof -- names shortened from Oude Roodezand Kloof and Nieuwe Roodezand Kloof. The easier access transformed the valley. Stock farming expanded into vineyards, fruit orchards, and vegetable cultivation, and the settlement of Roodezand grew large enough to be renamed Tulbagh in 1805.

The pass attracted distinguished travelers. Swedish botanist Carl Thunberg came through in 1772 and noted it was "one of the few chasms left by the long range of mountains through which it is possible for a wagon to pass," adding that in some places it was too narrow for two wagons to pass each other. The naturalist William Burchell traversed it in 1811. A tollgate was installed in 1807, with tariffs recorded by the historian Theal: a chaise cost four shillings, a loaded wagon four shillings, an unloaded wagon two, a saddle horse one, twenty oxen four shillings, and a hundred sheep four shillings. These tolls funded the road's maintenance through an era when the kloof was the primary artery between Cape Town and the interior's agricultural heart.

The legendary pass builder Thomas Bain reconnoitered the kloof in 1855 and proposed shifting the road to the western bank of the Klein Berg River. His recommendation was carried out in 1859 and 1860, producing a road that would serve for the next hundred years. A railway line was added along the same western bank between 1873 and 1874, threading the narrow gorge alongside the road. When twentieth-century traffic volumes finally outgrew Bain's alignment, construction returned to the original eastern bank -- the side Jacobus du Toit's farmers had first cleared two centuries earlier. The modern road opened in 1968, completing a full circle from Potter's failed attempt to navigate the gorge in 1658 to a paved highway following essentially the same line three hundred and ten years later.