chill and smell of decay, and the nameless terrors of the grave, it is not surprising that our ancestors should have equated caves with what they knew of volcanic vents and imagined the fires of hell in their depths. Dante’s Inferno is just one manifestation of an older oral tradition in Europe which told of animals, usually a dog or a goose, entering a cave to emerge days later from another miles away, devoid of fur or feathers and showing signs of singeing by infernal flames.
Lurid accounts of real caves are frequent in ancient literature. The Roman philosopher Seneca reported that a party of Greek silver prospectors who ventured underground had encountered:
“huge rushing rivers, vast still lakes, and spectacles fit to make them shake with horror. The land hung above their heads and the winds whistled hollowly in the shadows. In the depths, the frightful rivers led nowhere into the perpetual and alien night.”
Seneca adds that after their return to the surface, the miners “lived in fear for having tempted the fires of Hell.”
Fig. 1.1 Manner of crossing the first river in Peak Cavern, engraved by Cruikshank in 1797, from G.M. Woodward’s Eccentric excursions … in different parts of England & South Wales, pub. Allen & Co., London, 1801. (Courtesy of Trevor Shaw)
Perhaps the oldest written reference to a cave appears in a book about mountains written before 221 B.C. in China – a country where caves have been systematically explored and exploited over many centuries as water supplies and as sources of nitrates for fertilizer and for making gunpowder. The earliest surviving reference to a cave in Britain dates from around 200 A.D. in the writings of Titus Flavius Clemens, known as Clement of Alexandria. He writes:
“Such as have composed histories concerning the Britannic islands tell of a cavern beneath a mountain, and at the summit of it a cleft, and of how from the wind rushing into this cavern and reverberating from its hollows, an echo as of many cymbals is heard.”
Which cave this refers to is uncertain, but a location in either the Mendip Hills or Derbyshire would seem most likely since both areas were well-known as important centres of lead mining during this period. Current opinion favours the Great Cave of Wookey Hole which would undoubtedly have been known in Roman Britain and where, according to Balch (1929), a noise like the clash of cymbals can occasionally be heard.
Irish caves were also documented from the earliest times. The Annals of the Four Masters, written in 928 A.D., record the massacre of 1000 people in Dunmore Cave in County Kilkenny and if the abundant remains excavated there are anything to go by, the account may well be true.
The myth of the ‘howling cave’ resurfaces with Henry of Huntingdon in his mediaeval Historia Anglorum, written in Latin around 1135. He gives pride of place among the four “wonders of England” to a cave “from which the winds issue with great violence”. This one appears to have been situated in the Peak District and may have been Peak Cavern, since some time later Gervase of Tilbury, writing about this cave around 1211, states that strong winds sometimes blow out of it. The third of Huntingdon’s four wonders was also a cave, this time one situated at:
“Chederole where there is a cavity under the earth which many have often entered and where, although they have traversed great expanses of earth and rivers, they could never come to the end.”
This poses modern scholars with an interesting puzzle, for although there is indeed a well-known cave at Cheddar (open to the public as ‘Gough’s Cave’), it is short, easily explored and does not connect with the underground river known to flow beneath it. However, in 1985, cave divers Rob Harper and Richard Stevenson squeezed down a narrow pit in a forgotten corner of Gough’s Cave and emerged underwater into the main river, which they followed upstream to reach a large dry cavern, dubbed the Bishop’s Palace. The flooded system lies close to the water table, and the divers surmise that before the Cheddar rising was enclosed by a dam, the water level may have been low enough to permit entry into the now-flooded cave. On the other hand, the village of Cheddar (once known as ‘Cheddrehola’) is only some ten kilometres away from Wookey Hole, and Huntingdon may well have confused the two localities.
The surprising thing is not the doubts about the accuracy of Henry of Huntingdon’s accounts, but that he should have chosen caves for two of his four ‘wonders of England’. Other mediaeval chroniclers also mention caves and mostly follow Huntingdon’s accounts closely, as also do the various manuscript ‘Wonders of Britain’ or ‘Mirabilia’ which appeared between the 13th and 15th centuries.
In the 16th and early 17th centuries writers such as Leland, Camden, Drayton and Leigh, gripped by the Elizabethan romantic passion for ‘discovering the countryside’, penned lurid accounts of the caves they visited and of the legends and folklore attached to them. One looked forward to a planned visit to Wookey Hole with not a little trepidation:
“though we entered in frolicksome and merry, yet we might return out of it Sad and Pensive, and never more be seen to Laugh whilst we lived in the world.”
The early 17th century saw the rise of a craze for so-called ‘rogue books’ – sensationalized accounts of swashbuckling anti-heroes such as highwaymen and pirates, and some of these make reference to dastardly goings-on in the caves of Derbyshire. Sam Ridd’s The Art of Juggling (1612) portrayed Peak Cavern as a notorious centre of knavery, and Ben Jonson makes several allusions to this cave (under a different name) and its association with beggars and vagabonds in The Devil is an Ass (1616) and The Gipsies Metamorphosed (1621).
Later in the 17th century the Peak District and its caves continued to attract attention through the writings of Charles Cotton, best known for his collaboration with Izaak Walton on later editions of The Compleat Angler. Cotton’s fondness for caves may be not altogether unconnected with his habit of using them as a sanctuary when hiding from his creditors.
Fig. 1.2 An imaginary ‘straightened out’ view of Peak cavern. In the foreground are the rope-makers’ cottages. From a copper engraving titled The Devil’s Arse, near Castleton, in Derbyshire which appeared in Charles Leigh The natural history of Lancashire, Cheshire and the Peak in Derbyshire, pub. Oxford, 1700. (Courtesy of Trevor Shaw)
Daniel Defoe, the great traveller and polemicist, seems to have completely failed to appreciate the ‘Wonders of the Peak’ which so enthused his contemporaries. Dubbing them the ‘wonderless wonders’, he selects Peak Cavern for a particularly scornful treatment:
“… where we come to the so famed Wonder call’d, saving our good Manners, The Devil’s A--e in the Peak; Now not withstanding the grossness of the Name given it, and that there is nothing of similitude or coherence either in Form and Figure, or any other thing between the thing signified and the thing signifying; yet we must search narrowly for any thing in it to make a Wonder, or even any thing so strange, or odd, or vulgar, as the Name would seem to import.”
This seems a bit harsh, as the entrance to Peak Cavern is, I would have thought, impressive by any standards. On the other hand, Defoe goes right over the top in his reaction to nearby Eldon Hole: “this pothole is about a mile deep … and … goes directly down perpendicular into the Earth, and perhaps to the Center”. It is actually 75 m deep.
Although Defoe’s Tour was not intended to be a guide book, a series of revisions by various editors up to 1778 made it ever more like one; even going to the lengths of adding in descriptions of caves not included in the original version. The success of the
