Ernest A. Baker

“ Stripes and reticulations and pendulous lacework run all over it in enchanting disorder. Here a snow-white flood of calcite drops from an unseen cleft, there a cascade of many colours ripples down from roof to floor. There are great sheets of opaline enamel, curtains drooping in massy folds, silken fabrics wrinkled over the face of the rock, all giving one the sense of motion suddenly arrested, and of light and colour captured from the rainbow and sleeping here in the darkness, waiting year after year for our lamp to awaken it to life and beauty. ”

“ Once more we drove back over Mendip in the dark. All around us on the desolate plateau was impenetrable gloom, but in the northern sky, and it seemed but a few miles away, the lights of Bath and Bristol flared across the heavens like two immense conflagrations. Never does one feel the sublimity of the open, windy earth, the starry sky, and the free sense of space, so profoundly as after striving for a long day to break through the barriers that shut us out from the regions of mystery under the hills. ”

“ SWALLET
From two to three miles north of Wookey Hole, on the top of the Mendip tableland, is a broad, shallow valley, surrounded on every side by higher ground. It is a grey, desolate tract, with few trees dotted over its surface, but a thick belt of wood on the south, the dark green of which in summer, and the black stems in winter, make the grey landscape seem the more arid, gaunt, and desolate. The ruined engine house of a deserted lead mine does not add to the attractiveness of the scenery. ”

“ While some of the party were photographing the "show place," a lofty dome-shaped cavern with its sheet of stalagmite poured over the cliff like a petrified waterfall, two of us retraced our steps from "St. Paul's," as this beautiful sight is nicknamed, to the branch leading to the other principal shows. "Solomon's Temple" is a wonderful grotto, walled, roofed, and floored with gleaming white and ivory calcite, and set at the top of another great fall of stalagmite which has flowed on and on in a gentle stream and covered the floor of a lofty cavern with dimpling waves of crystal. ”

“ Descending still through an irregular passage, we suddenly entered a roomy vault with stalactites on the roof. Here the glories of Lamb's Lair begin. In a few moments we shall be at the threshold of the incomparable Beehive Chamber, and thence, to a point far beyond what we can attain to-day, the poetry and witchery of cave scenery are at their finest. Stumbling over the irregularities of the crystal floor, we see dimly, by the light of our candles, great luminous arcs bending over our heads ”

“ When the limelight is brought in, and its fierce beams play upon the wild arcades and groining of this fantastic vault, we are astounded by the wealth and brilliance and extraordinary variety of the incrustations: not a rib, not a corner of bare rock remains visible; every inch of floor and walls and roof has been thickly coated with the calcareous enamel. The Beehive itself, 12 feet high and enormous in girth, is not more astonishing for its size than for the regularity of its shape. It is probably the largest boss of stalagmite in England. ”

“ It would seem that the solid mass of the hill has been shivered here into vast, roughly cubical fragments, between which lie the irregular passages and narrow chambers of the cavern. Many tempting galleries lead the explorer on and on till they dwindle to a mere rabbit hole, or till he finds himself wedged in the cleft between two enormous surfaces of rock. Disorderly accumulations of boulders and splinters cover the floor; there is hardly a level spot anywhere, and it is desirable to explore every yard carefully with a taper or a lantern to avoid the consequences of a rash step. ”

“ The whole of the country surrounding the two first-named caverns is dotted with innumerable small pits and hollows. The great swallet of Hillgrove, three miles north of Wells, in the exploration of which we are at present engaged, in an endeavour to penetrate the labyrinth of ways to which it will undoubtedly afford access, is a fine example of an intermittent swallet. Here three ways, carved deeply through the stream-borne sands and clays of some uncertain epoch of geological history, converge in a deep glen, beautiful with its tropical wealth of ferns. ”

“ The grotto is irregular in shape, and the incrustations are disposed without order or system. From every nook and corner in the superimpending rocks bundles of stalactite spears are thrust; bosses and pillars spring from the floor, and sometimes meet the descending shafts. Of all these frail pillars, the finest, rising on the very edge of the rift we had ascended, seems to support the whole ponderous roof, like the fragile column left by a dexterous architect, to cheat the eye, in some cathedral vestibule. ”

“ An abundant harvest is there waiting to be reaped; for on every side are obvious indications of half-buried gateways to the dark and secret pathways to the netherworld, and everywhere upon the surface of the Mendip tableland lie the open pits and hollows which the local speech calls "swallets," that is to say, swallow holes, some of them dry, some actively engulfing streams, but all testifying to untold ages of water action.
This Limestone district lies far from the busy hives of industry, remote and secluded in the very heart of lovely Somerset. ”

“ Unlike the other parts, where every bit of débris is sealed down by a glistening layer of stalagmite, this great cavity is heaped high with loose fragments, as free from incrustation as if the ceiling had collapsed yesterday. So wild and vast is the configuration of "O'Leary's Cave" that, standing on the lower side and looking across a depression in the middle to the ascending ground opposite, one fancied oneself, in the dim candlelight, gazing across a valley to a range of hills in the distance. ”

“ Such a formation is not rare in water caverns; but in such beauty of shape and hue it is rare indeed, for these tender little crystal flowers took all [109] manner of forms, blossoming ofttimes into wreaths and clusters like a miniature coral. One of the most exquisite and most puzzling features was that the dots and spicules were often arranged in set patterns, symmetrical and even geometrical, in tiny circles, squares, and triangles, by the rhythmic action of the waters that had left this beautiful record of their passage. We named the cave the Coral Cavern. ”

“ This changelessness of everything fills one with a certain awe; but what impresses one as still more wonderful is that all this consummate beauty and grandeur should lie concealed and unknown in the midst of modern England, only a few miles away from important cities, but unvisited by a soul for long periods of years, while the country people seem hardly aware of the cave's existence. Were the cave easily accessible, one can hardly question that crowds of sightseers would be attracted, and much of the charm would be dispelled, even if its treasures were not ransacked. ”

“ At present, beyond the stark shape of the windlass, darkness reigned. We flung blocks of arragonite out into the void. There was an interval of silence, then a crash on the hard floor, and the missile burst into fragments. When the ray of our 2000-candle-power searchlight flashed across the abyss, we found ourselves looking into a chamber whose weird majesty held us spellbound. Its height is 110 feet, and the walls curve gradually over in an irregular dome. ”

“ Then we make our way across the sandbanks, between the pools, into the largest chamber of all, with a roof of enormous span, whose breadth dwarfs its height, arching over the sleeping river and the broad slopes of sand, whereon grotesque Limestone monoliths take the likeness of prehistoric monsters sleeping by the waterside. Through the clear water we can discern a submerged arch communicating with more distant caverns. ”

“ This giving out, we scrambled along the cliffs of the canyons, which seemed in the gloom without top or bottom, bestraddling the rift, or with feet on one side and back to the other pushing on from hold to hold. The Limestone grips would have been amply sufficient for this mode of progression had they not been drenched and slippery. Below us the waters raced and bellowed. At the junctions of the canyons they sounded on all sides at once; the invisible hollows all round seemed to be alive with angry voices, mad to be at us. What if a thunderstorm burst over Mendip now? ”

“ In driving an extensive level through a hill, at a point 80 fathoms below the summit, they came upon a gigantic rift. A man was let down on a long rope—so tradition reports—and when he had descended to the full extent of it he was unable to see either walls or bottom of the tremendous abyss. We are probably on the track of this monster cavity, an exploration of which will entail labour and fortitude. That and the exploration of the swallet at Hillgrove, when it is opened, are the two most fascinating problems awaiting us in the immediate future. ”

“ Burrington Combe is a smaller Limestone defile on the north side of Mendip—that is to say, the opposite side to that of Cheddar. It is smaller, and because of its proximity to Cheddar it has to suffer disadvantageous comparisons. Anywhere else the grandeur of Burrington Combe, the magnificence of its crags, with dark, heather-clad Black Down lowering behind them, and the beauty of the copses that lurk in its corners and clamber up its precipices, would excite the admiration of guide-books and attract crowds of tourists. ”

“ On the walls were folds and ridges of snowy stalagmite, and from the roof hung stalactites of all shapes and sizes, myriads of threadlike growths hanging in a lacy fringe. Onwards the arcading and the array of pillars extended into a roomy vault, the end of which struck upwards, as already explained, south-eastwards, toward Dry Gill. Though a perceptible draught comes through from the open air, and the heaps of clay-coated blocks show that a swallet is not far off above, no way can be forced through without excavation. ”

“ Along the course of the larger streams huge chambers occur; for the ever-eddying water, bearing sand along in its course, eats out the sides of its channel, or, revolving stones in its bed, carves out the pothole by friction. Or some pendent mass of rock has its support undermined and comes crashing into the streamway, only to be broken up and carried away by the ceaseless energy of the stream, so ever enlarging the chambers upwards towards the light of day. But whilst this action is going on underground, a more potent factor is at work where the subterranean stream first sees the light. ”

“ The geographical might be called the sporting sciences. And so there are now many ardent cave explorers who would blush to be called speleologists, their sole motive being the enjoyment of the game, and scientific results purely a by-product. Thus the science of caves has given birth to a sport that subserves its aims in the same irregular way as rock-climbing and peak-bagging subserve the aims of geography, geology, meteorology, and other sciences.
Speleology itself is, comparatively, a new science. ”

“ An insignificant crevice, a hole scarcely wide enough to tempt a dog or fox, alone gives admittance to what is perhaps the wildest and most magnificent cavern in Britain. Swildon's Hole, it has already been stated, lies at the same level, 780 feet above the sea, as the Eastwater Swallet and that of Hill Grove. It lies in a separate trough, within the same basin as the Eastwater stream, with whose waters it unites somewhere in the bowels of the rocky hills, to flow out of Wookey Hole as the river Axe, of which it may be considered as the principal feeder. ”

“ The dens and caves of the earth have afforded a retreat to the persecuted of all generations, and a ready-made home when all else has failed. Here, too, with the rocky walls behind him and his protecting fires at the entrance, early man could defy the savage beasts that roamed the land in those far-off days.
At Wookey Hole it was only necessary to scratch the very surface of the accumulated débris within the mouth of the great cave to turn up fragments of Romano-British pottery and a human jaw and rib-bones. ”

“ In its headlong course the water again and again leaps down some great series of potholes, as down some giant stairway, forming many fine cascades, whose deafening roar goes on for ever where there is no ear to hear and where no footstep ever treads the rocky ways. ”

“ In many cases no special precautions are necessary, but if there are numerous bifurcations, specific measures must be adopted. Often it is sufficient to station a hurricane lamp or a good-sized candle at the cross roads; a surer method, but one that is rather troublesome, is to unreel a thread as we advance. Such a cavern as Goatchurch, in Burrington Combe, Somerset, is a perplexing maze, where one loses one's bearings completely two minutes after looking at the compass. The mass of the hill is shivered into innumerable fragments, of giant size. ”

“ Arch springs from arch up to the lofty summit, and the walls and vaulting are full of canopied recesses, with wild foliations of glistening calcite wreathed from niche to niche.
Below us, as we enter, a broad deep pool stretches away into darkness. Could we follow the gently moving current in a boat, we should enter another great vault, whose existence the ordinary visitor never suspects. [50] There, in a small passage beyond the water, Mr. Balch discovered human remains. ”

“ Still piloted by our kind host, we walked across Burrington Ham and saw the brook which we had heard babbling amid the silence of Goatchurch Cavern flowing out, a strong body of water, at Rickford Rising, after a subterranean course of about two miles from its sources high up on Black Down.
Rickford Rising is in the Secondary beds, but a short mile up the beautiful Combe at whose outlet it lies, a Limestone ridge comes down to the road. Hard by the extremity is a hole in the rocky ground, now almost entirely choked with stones, but not so many years ago an open pit. ”