Mendip: Its Swallet Caves and Rock Shelters

By H. E. Balch

Mendip - Its Swallet Caves and Rock Shelters, Second Edition provides detailed descriptions of caves and rock shelters of the Mendip Hills. The book contains photographs, surveys, and descriptions of rock caves in Mendip Hills such as Swildon's Hole, Long Wood Swallet, Eastwater Cavern, Lamb Lair, and G.B. Cave. Also included are descriptions of the caves of the Burrington District, western and eastern Mendip, and discussions on the antiquity of the Mendip caves and the distribution of the Mendip swallets. Spelunkers or potholers and speleologists will find the book very informative and interesting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Oct 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483195216

Book preview

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

........ Far more than these,

the Poet sees;

He can behold

Aquarius old

Walking the fenceless fields of air,

And from each ample fold,

Of the clouds about him rolled,

Scattering everywhere

The showery rain,

As the farmer scatters his grain.

He can behold

Things manifold,

Things that have not been wholly told,

Have not been wholly sung nor said,

For his thought, which never stops,

Follows the watery drops

Down to the graves of the dead;

Down through chasms and gulfs profound,

To the dreary fountain-head

Of lakes and rivers underground;

And sees them, when the rain is done,

Over bridge of colours seven,

Climbing up once more to heaven,

Opposite the setting sun.

— Longfellow, Rain in Summer.

The very name of Mendip conjures up visions of deep gorges and ravines, wild and beautiful, sources of great springs welling forth from the solid rock, now perhaps with a peaceful murmur, and later swelling to a great roar as the torrent is driven forth by the great pressure of her hidden waters.

Of the two principal gorges, those of Cheddar and Wookey Hole, with Ebbor, and their great systems of springs and caves, I have told in the first two books of this series, and in others now long out of print. From the point of view of pre-history they far exceed in importance the story of most of those wonderful caves of engulfment of which I now proceed to tell, and of those lesser caves dotted about the hills, some of which have been known for many years, like those of Loxton and Banwell. The great caves of engulfment, Swallow Holes or Swallets as they are called, are the feeders which carry down the water of upland — usually Old Red Sandstone—springs and surface rainfall, and have formed the caverns near the points of outlet on the lower lands, and those measureless to man behind them and deeper in the hills.

These are they on which the explorers of my generation were engaged for many years, and which have added to the attractions of Somerset a series of caves of exquisite beauty, in penetrating which as pioneers we often carried our lives in our hands. Where now the explorer finds the trail blazed for him and knows he can safely pass, we felt our way step by step, often held up by treacherous rocks or blocked passages, by unexplored labyrinths, by black pits whose depths were unknown, or into which waterfalls thundered.

To the new generation of Cave Men and explorers, great men as they are, the names of Willcox and Troup, Metcalfe, Scott, and Parkinson ; Harold, Wilfred and Frank Hiley ; Baker, Kentish and Bamforth ; Savory, Richardson, Barnes, Rex and Eric Bird, Sinnock, and my brother Reginald, are hardly a memory. Twenty -thirty-forty even fifty years ago these were the men we called on in our need. To name them calls up memories of long days and nights underground, of groping forward step by step as we levered great rocks out of the way, of digging inch by inch through impeding debris, of settling masses which had to be underpinned, of sitting beneath heavy drip as we broke away some impeding spur involving hammering for hours together ; of the thrill when a rock dropped down behind two of us as we were jammed in a passage unable to turn; of puzzling variations of the compass needle as we made some survey ; of the first descent into pits of which none knew the bottom ; of hours, days, months and even years of persistent and careful searching of cave floors as we tried to read accurately the story of the cave dwellers of old. They were days to have known, and men to have known and some of them left us to dig in Flanders fields and to leave their bones there. Now in the last days of the greatest of all wars, history has repeated itself. Again a new generation of cave explorers has been called up for their country’s defence. In this book, however, excellent accounts of their work of recent years have added most important chapters to the story of Mendip caves, which will be read by the newest recruits to this great work of exploration, providing the thrills of real adventure at first hand, which so far transcends those to be got by watching the artificial adventures of the cinema. The chapters by Dr. Barker (late of Bristol University) on the great G.B. cave, and that by the Stride Brothers on the Long Wood Swallet and that of Burrington called the Sidcot Swallet, will be read with absorbing interest, and I am glad that they are willing to add. them to my book. Sidcot School has not yet finished its contribution to our Mendip records, for two younger scholars are making and will make cave history. One of them has discovered and completely explored the first and only Wolf’s Den in Mendip, at Barton Rocks, and the other, William Stanton (who is also a member of the Wells Society) is carrying out, almost single-handed, the exploration of Scragg’s Hole, a shelter which bids fair to be of considerable importance (see Chapter VIII). But to my subject.

It must not be thought that we have been able in every case where we have made an effort, to enter these upland caves and travel far down their channels ; and in no case have we yet entered a cave on the hill-top and come out with the great rising to which it leads. The very important St. Andrews’ Well, under the shadow of the eastern end of Wells Cathedral, is an instance where we have never set foot in any of its swallet feeders, though we know them well. For at least a mile above the outlet its subterranean channel is deeply submerged and, in normal times, so sluggish is the stream beneath the last mile of valley, that a fluorescine test proved that it took forty-nine hours to travel that mile ; an almost incredibly slow rate of flow. Yet in time of heavy rain we find it a torrent of many millions of gallons a day, bursting up and even heaping sand above its level, making in gardens gaping holes out of which the water gushes, at times leaping into the air, overflowing lawns and, with impetuous torrent, doing its best to sap ancient foundations. To stand among these welling springs under such circumstances is to experience a sense of insecurity such as I imagine one must feel when some earthquake shock causes buildings to vibrate and the solid earth to crack.

But the main purpose of this book is rather to tell fully for the first time the story of the progressive exploration of the great swallet caves of Mendip, and of the adventures that have accompanied our efforts. Until our work in this direction, not a single yard of the two great swallets of Swildon’s Hole and Eastwater was known. They form the subject of my second and third chapters, while the amazing cave of Lamb Lair, now usually called Lamb Leer, though Collinson (1791) names it Lamb Leare, known for much more than two centuries and lost for a hundred years, forms the theme of the fourth. Burrington was for long the chief hunting ground of the Bristol University Speleological Society, following our simpler work there towards the close of the last century. For their more recent work readers are referred to Chapters VI and VII on the great G.B. cave and the Long Wood Swallet. The last word has not been written on any of these places, but any further penetration will only be possible with much difficulty and some danger.

At times quarrying operations have revealed some new entrance to the underworld. In 1905 at Windsor Hill such a place was exposed with a descent of 40 ft. into a beautiful grotto which, doomed to destruction, provided the British Museum with much desired specimens (Plates 32, 33).

Quarrying operations also, in 1935 and 1936, revealed at Underwood Quarry, within a hundred yards of the boundary of our ancient city of Wells, a filled-up swallet of great antiquity in the carboniferous limestone, and at a depth of 14 to 23 ft., the great bones and teeth of a Hippopotamus, the first of his kind to be found in the Mendip region, together with teeth and bones of Elephas antiquus (much older than the Mammoth), indicating an age even beyond that of the extinct mammals of Wookey Hole. It is in ways such as these that accurate knowledge of the past history of our land is extended, and the student of its lore kept in a constant state of hopeful expectation. Any chance explosive charge may reveal some filled-up fissure, such as some years ago, in Messrs. Foster Yeoman’s quarry at Dulcote, threw out a mass of bones representing four or five great Bison. There is no limit to the possibility of the contents of such fissures, for it is well known that at Holwell, near Frome, they contain the teeth of creatures of Rhaetic age, such as Moore found early in the last century, and as one may find to-day.

In another chapter in this book I have confirmed the opinion I formed long ago that our swallet caves are of profound antiquity, vital factors in lowering the level of the Mendip plateau, and leaving, as the lines of their drainage change, open fissures on hill-tops to be hunting pitfalls or traps for unwary feet, such as the Hippopotamus, Elephants, and Wild Cattle before mentioned. I could never see any reason to doubt that it is quite possible that some day even Eocene animals may be represented in some completely sealed and mineralized mass filling such hidden fissures. When the conditions are favourable, such as at Banwell, or as in the recent Underwood Quarry find, the bones can be cleaned and quite detached from the surrounding matrix, even if sealed in a clay mass in which lime infiltration has been prevented or restricted, I see no limit to the possible age of such hermetically sealed fossil bones as may come to light at any time. Who knows, it may yet be the good fortune of Mendip to find some such early type of man as was found at Piltdown.

Thus it is that with a refinement of the gold-seeker’s fever, the cave digger is always on the tip-toe of expectation, and, whether it be in the van of some great effort to penetrate the unknown, or laboriously digging inch by inch to reveal the contents of the deep floor of a cave dwelling, he shares the thrills of the early explorers on the outposts of our Empire.

Thus it was that our cathedral city of Wells, a veritable shrine whose existence is due to the marvellous preservation of its antiquities, became the centre from which in the final decade of last century sprang the greatest age of cave research Mendip has ever known. This to-day shows no sign of decay, but rather tends to renew and extend its activities; so now I, coming to the close of my active life of exploration, put on record my long experience, to be a basis upon which other explorers may build.

Before I proceed further, I should perhaps make clear the meaning of certain customary terms used among Mendip cave explorers. SWALLET is, as the name implies, a swallow-hole, not necessarily always in action. If we desire to describe a swallet with running water entering it, we prefix the word active. A thousand swallets, great and small, dot the area of Carboniferous Limestone in Mendip. Further east on our hills, i.e., Stoke Lane and its neighbourhood, such active swallets are called by the Mendippers, Slockers. SYPHON, originally used to indicate a passage the top of which is submerged, has been superseded by us in favour of the word TRAP, which is more correct, resembling as it does the trap used in drainage. I have never found more than one true Syphon, and that being out of sight I have only listened to, not seen, in the Wet Way of Swildon’s Hole. CANYON is a deep and steep-sided channel worn by water along some line of weakness in the limestone, and may vary from 6 to 30 ft. in depth. CHIMNEY is a vertical water-pipe, usually seen overhead above some important water-worn channel below. I think there must be one beneath each of the shallow depressions, like saucers or basins, on the hill-top, which range from 5 to 100 ft. across or more. TRAVERSE is used to indicate a route not down the dip of the rocks, but more or less across the face, to reach some desired objective. CREEPS are tiny passages where to carry one’s pack is impossible, and everything has to be passed from hand to hand. BOULDER is used in a special sense. Some geologists would complain of our use of it, as it is applied more commonly to the transported and often perched rocks of the glacial period, but there is no other word which so well expresses the detached masses of rock, varying from 2 to 5 or 6 ft. irregular cubes which figure so largely, covering the floors of chambers or piled in wild confusion underground. If it is a rock of special size or shape, like some weighing many tons, such is indicated in the text. POTHOLE is a more or less circular depression in the bed of a stream formed by the rotation of stones by the water, themselves rounded into pebbles, large and small, in the process. Such pot-holes may be 1 ft. in diameter with a few inches of water, or they may be 20 ft. in diameter, very deep, and with thousands of great pebbles. They are often in series as many as a dozen succeeding each other, with a waterfall between. When the action has gone on till a deep pit has been formed with the pot-hole at the bottom, it is dignified by the name of POT (e.g., the40-Foot Pot, the Double Pot, etc.). CAVE PEARLS are little pearl-like objects formed by gentle drip into a cavity lined with crystalline stalagmite, where minute fragments of stone have been carried in and coated with layer on layer like a pearl, and polished, as it has been rubbed against its neighbour, until a little basin like a bird’s nest with its eggs has been formed. They are very beautiful objects. There are good specimens in Wells Museum, found by myself and Wm. Stanton on a mud bank in an old Sandford mine. STALAGMITE is, of course, the mass formed on the floor of the drip which has left the corresponding STALACTITE on the roof. We never get one without the other, unless the drip is into a pool. At times, one has secured much more of the deposit than the other, and usually the lower is much the larger and longer, although this is by no means always the case. It is among the crystalline stalactites that the strange forms of erratics, of which I shall speak elsewhere, are to be seen. The Bristol men name them (not too happily) Helictites (Helix = a spiral, hence a snail). Their theory that they are fed by capillary attraction may be near the truth, and should be capable of proof. S BENDS" are always small and difficult passages in a creep, where the body has to be twisted to conform to the shape. When accompanied by water, standing or falling, they are unpleasant. CHOKE is an accumulation of debris, which, held up by some jammed stones, has diverted the stream and often led to the formation of a new passage. Perhaps after a number of years—may be thousands—it is worn away and the old route restored. There are many of these known to us, and they have been very important in determining the lines of subterranean drainage. OXBOW is a passage, wet or dry, leaving a streamway and reaching it again further on, not very common, but seen in Swildon’s Hole, Wookey Hole, Cheddar, and to some extent in Eastwater Cavern. TRIBUTARY is used for a channel coming in to join a main way of descent whether it is still occupied by a stream, or has been abandoned for some other route. The majority of these at some time or another still bring in water, at least to some extent. RIFT is used to designate a widened joint in the limestone, often of great height and worn by water action into the form of a high, narrow, chamber. Great rifts have, undoubtedly, had a large share in the formation of limestone ravines. They are often associated with faults, or displacements in the rocks, such as are responsible for various features of the landscape, among the older rocks. TUFA is a kind of earthy stalagmite which is formed where evaporation is rapid, either near the surface in a cave, or actually in the open air. It is best known as the deposit of petrifying springs such as that in Dulcote village, or that very important deposit on the south slope of the Poldens near Chilton Polden, where the deposit has been quarried for building parts of Wells and Glastonbury. With this explanation, the reader will be enabled the better to follow my description of the underworld of