Pringle's travels during these 16 months at Glen Lynden achieved much for him – a wide knowledge of the country and its people, with a slow growth of his commitment to raising up the oppressed indigenous groups, and absorption of its varied beauty: forested mountains beside the bleak harshness and sterility of parched plains and their teeming animal life, which found its way into his poetry when ‘recollected in tranquillity’. No poet before him had translated his romantic, Arcadian view of nature to the wilds of southern Africa.

In his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa there is writing of descriptive power not to be found in Barrow, Burchell or Lichtenstein and of a beauty acknowledged even by Cory, who saw Pringle as an enemy of the colonists he so admired.

The first of his three major journeys was made for a hard practical purpose. In July and August 1820 it had become clear that cattle and sheep rather than crops must provide the party's livelihood. The market – the infant Port Elizabeth – was too far and the roads towards it execrable. There was sufficient water to irrigate only 50 or 60 acres. Every effort was made to grow barley and wheat, and orchards were planted but it was quickly realized that vastly more than the 1100 acres allotted to the whole party would be essential to their survival. One hundred acres per adult male in such a landscape was derisory and ‘even a thousand acres per family was an inadequate allotment’.