This entrance is 2 ft. 9 in. wide in the centre. The wall on the west side is perfect up to 5 ft. in height, and that on the east side to 6 ft. 6 in. There are two steps on the outer side, and these are formed by the courses in the foundation being carried across the entrance and curved inwards at the centre of the passage.
On either side of the entrance in the interior of the temple there are plumb and angular buttresses of poor construction resting upon soft soil. Each projects 5 ft. 6 in. into _No. 3 Enclosure_, and each is 1 ft. 9 in. high, the width between their straight faces being 2 ft. 8 in. Each buttress is rounded off on the outer side and joins the main wall, that on the east side being 7 ft. long, and that on the west side 9 ft. 6 in. long.
When Bent arrived at Zimbabwe in 1891 he found this entrance built up to a height of 9 ft. This had then been done some fifty years previously by the Makalanga when the previous Mogabe Chipfuno was only a boy. This walling-up was for the purpose of closing in _No. 3 Enclosure_, which was used as a cattle kraal. It is highly probable that the Makalanga took the upper portions of the two buttresses which are on either side of the inside of this entrance for building material in so walling it up, for these buttresses, judging by the absence of stone débris and the condition of the faces of the main wall where the buttresses were once built up against it, appear to have been deliberately denuded of their courses for at least some feet of their original height.
Bent removed the walling-up, but left its foundation in the entrance at 2 ft. below which the paved passage and steps were unburied in September, 1902. This foundation of the Makalanga wall was laid across a pile of blocks thrown promiscuously on to the floor of this entrance, and this again rested on soil black with charcoal, decomposed vegetable matter, and bones of buck split open for the marrow, and this débris contained broken articles of Makalanga make, but of superior quality to those made by them to-day.
This entrance is in the north-east wall of the temple, and its exit faces north-east, twenty-five degrees, and is situated between the (523 ft. 6 in.) and (536 ft.) points of the measurement of the inside base of the main wall from the south side of the west entrance, and between the [566 ft. 6 in.] and [571 ft. 6 in.] points of the measurement of the outside base of the main wall from the south side of same entrance. It has always been known as the North Entrance, as it is on the north side of the centre of the temple. Bent terms it the North Entrance, as do other writers, and in our description it will be so styled.