The paper outlines the impetus to, trajectory and impact of enclosure in the Cape Colony between the passing of the Fencing Act in 1883 and 1910. By increasing landowners' control over their environment, fencing enabled a suite of remedial measures that raised the productivity of the commercial small-stock sector. Fences also came to stand in the stead of the landowner in defending farms against human or animal trespass. The compartmentalization of the countryside into enclosures facilitated a more general re-ordering and re-assigning of humans and animals within it, resulting in a depersonalization of rural social relations. In all these ways the enclosure movement laid the ideological foundations for the hegemony of private property and the market economy in the countryside.