The Mendip Caves

By H. E. Balch

The Mendip Caves examines the demographic features of Wookey Hole caves, and the Cheddar gorge and caves. This book contains eight chapters that discuss the history of the places and the caves. The first chapters addresses some important exploration of the subterranean river, Cox’s cave, Gough’s cave, Swallet caves, Rock shelters, and the Badger Hole. The succeeding chapters describe the great Cave of Wookey Hole; characteristics and personalities of the people living in the cave; description of the noises heard inside the cave; the discovery and historical background of the cave; and detailed description of Valley of Wookey Hole and the Gorge of Ebbor. Other chapters examine the artefacts discovered in the cave, the traditions and daily activities done inside the cave, and the antiquity of the caves of Mendip. The last chapters explore the caves and shelters of eastern Mendip, as well as the Levvy of Sandford Hill. The book can provide useful information to the archaeologists, explorers, students, and researchers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Oct 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483195490

Book preview

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses the introductory phase of the great cave of Wookey Hole and the strange noises and sounds, in reference to which certain facts were known even in the second century of the Christian era. The cave is famous not only for its great size but for the perfect illustration it supplies of the whole process of cave and cave-valley formation and for its marvelous history. The first phase in the formation of the cave may be examined in the more remote upper galleries, while in the great chambers at river level, the subterranean Axe is forever sapping at the foundation of those mighty walls, which seem capable of defying its every effort. This marvelous place has revealed its secrets to daring divers as also to the visitor, under the penetrating beam of the electric light, and a scene of wonder has been made so accessible that it can readily be seen in an hour. In the old days of the Cave and up to 1926, it was the custom for visitors to carry a candle and for the guide to throw on the river a flare of benzoline or petrol.

OVER all the caves of Mendip this wonderful cavern is paramount in its appeal to the explorer. It has given its name to the village where it lies. It is famous not only for its great size, but for the perfect illustration it supplies of the whole process of cave and cave-valley formation, and for its marvellous history.

The first phase in the formation of the cave may be examined in the more remote upper galleries, whilst in the great chambers at river level the subterranean Axe is for ever sapping, sapping, sapping at the foundation of those mighty walls, which seem capable of defying its every effort.

Here at the mouth of the Cave we may listen in flood time, as Axe bursts its bonds and comes roaring out of the Cave as if in joy of its sudden freedom, racing away down the valley on its way to Severn Sea.

So with Tennyson we hear

"The sound of streams that, swift or slow,

Draw down aeonian hills and sow

dust of continents to be."

Here, too, we may see written in the rocks the story of the degradation of Old Mendip from the lofty height of a mountain chain, for the rock mass of Triassic Age is the debris of ages of denudation of that ancient eminence. Storey above storey rise the old river levels, each marking a stage in the lowering of the plain of secondary rocks between it and the sea.

But to the ordinary man or woman, stronger still is its appeal, due to the records we have been able to reveal of the comings and goings of Man in this weird place through all its history. Here came Man far back towards the dawn of humanity, and, ill-armed and ill-clad, he defied the ravenous beasts of Pleistocene time, and took possession of their Den for a home so long as he desired. He and his mate must have lived a life of fear in those distant days, for himself and for his offspring, with an ever-present fear also of lack of food. The beasts he killed and the fruits of the wild left little margin for choice or reserve. In the third book of this series I shall tell of more ancient hunters of Milton Hill, hard by, when our climate was sub-tropical and the great hippopotamus and most ancient elephants roamed the hills and vales of Mendip.

Of all this I shall tell and more, for every hillside around shows traces of successive arrivals of those men who came after him, when most of the ravenous beasts had perished and man had increased. Now Man feared Man and made his weapons accordingly. In the ancient Stone Age he had been content rudely to chip his weapons of flint. The folk who followed him have left us their beautifully polished weapons, wrought with infinite patience and skill. After them came those craftsmen of the Bronze Age, whose tombs in hundreds dot the hilltop above and whose weapons littered the outlook post of Arthur’s Point at the entrance of the valley. (See Plate 15, p. 71.)

Then came in Britain the approach of the present era. When Rome and Carthage were struggling for the mastery, a tribe came overseas from Brittany and found their way to Somerset. They followed the Axe to its source and found our lovely valley, and there began an occupation of the great cave which for human interest is unsurpassed. Every detail of their lives was indelibly written in the material of the floor, dug out and examined by us in five years of digging. Of all this I shall tell, and of times of stress and suffering when the final resource of starving humanity was resorted to, and relics of cannibal feasts lay in the debris of the floor. Yet the cave-dwellers held their own, even when Rome overran the land, or it may be they were too remote or unimportant to be crushed, even when their relatives of the Lake Villages perished. With the dawn of Christianity, out of the darkness of the cave floor appeared the labarum, the bold monogram of Christ, with its alpha and omega forming the reverse of the coins of the Christian emperors of Rome. (See Plate 14, fig 8, p. 65.)

Now legend comes in and the persistent story of the Witch of Wookey, whom I shall show to have been a real personage whose bones and poor possessions were found by us, while Welsh legend will be shown to have a suggestion that she met her death at the hands of the hero-king Arthur.

Later still comes the reputation of this historic cave as a ghost-haunted place, to which the parson with bell and book was accustomed to condemn the wandering ghosts of the country round.

Jennings in Mysteries of Mendip, long ago recited what was the custom of his day:

"To lay the lorn spirit you o’er it must pray,

And command it at length to be gone far away,

And in Wookey’s deep hole to be under control

For the space of seven years and a day.

If then it returns you must pray and command,

At midnight, by moonlight, by Death’s ebon wand.

That to Cheddar cliffs now it departeth in peace,

And another seven years its sore troubling will cease.

If still it returns, as I warn you it will

To the Red Sea for ever command it, and never

Or voice more or sound, in that house shall be found."

Now in these latter days this marvellous place has revealed its secrets to daring divers as also to the visitor, under the penetrating beam of the electric light, and a scene of wonder has been made so accessible that it can readily be seen in an hour.

In the old days of the Cave, and up to 1926, it was the custom for visitors to carry a candle, and for the guide to throw on the river a flare of benzoline or petrol. Many is the roll of magnesium ribbon which I have burned there, in the effort to illuminate more fully the great halls of the place. It was such an experience which inspired the Rev. C. F. Metcalfe, one of my earliest helpers in the cave work, to write a delightful impression of that illumination:

"A glow, a gleam, a broader beam,

Startles those realms of ancient Night;

While bats whirl round on slanting wing,

Astonished at this awful thing.

The rocky roof’s reflected rays

Are caught up in the waterways,

And every jewelled stalactite

Is bathed in that stupendous light.

One moment only, then the caves

Are plunged again in Stygian waves,

The fairy dream has passed away,

And Night resumes her ancient sway."

Rev. E. B. Burrow, Curate of Chelwood, in The Mendip Hills—a descriptive poem—1849, wrote:

"Lift high the wand, cleave deep the sounding heath,

Plunge, spirit of my song, and, far beneath,

Mid chilling damps and darkness of the tomb,

Wave thy strong pinions through primeval gloom.

Where never gleam of light, nor gale of spring,

Nor scent of flowers their cheering influence bring;

Where never voice hath sounded, foot hath trod,

Nor eye hath pierced, except the eye of God.

Here deep within the bowels of the land,

Shrouded in Night the caverned wonders stand.

And vaulted arch and marble galleries rise,

Clothed in a vest of amber draperies.

And polished shafts, as virgin honey clear,

Their beauteous forms in long procession rear.

And golden thrones and fretted roofs are there,

Still pining for the day, with ever-dropping tear."

I shall tell how Wookey Hole is a place of strange noises and sounds, in reference to which certain facts were known even in the second century of the Christian era.

In Angels and Men, a poem, W. W. Smith (of Wells), 1876, mentions them