No one really knows who was that Kent whose name the cavern bears. The popular notion that the place was only discovered in modern times is an error, for evidences exist of its being known through the Middle Ages, down to our own time. The prehistoric remains, and not the cavern itself, are the modern finds, and that there were visitors and curiosity-hunters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is evident in the names scratched on the rocky walls, and still visible through the slowly growing film of stalactite. Thus “William Petre, 1571,” writes himself, by the mere fact of his scribbling here, ancestor of the ’Arries of to-day, and of the same glorious company is one who boldly inscribes himself “Robert Hedges of Ireland, Feb. 20, 1688.” This was no Irishman, but a Devonshire yeoman from a farm or hamlet called “Ireland,” on the other side of Dartmouth.
It remained for modern times to thoroughly explore this natural rift in the limestone. There were several very potent reasons why this should not have been done before. Perhaps a little dread of the unknown was partly the cause; geological science was in its infancy, and in this then solitary neighbourhood there was no one leisured enough, or sufficiently interested, to investigate.
It was in 1824 Mr. Northmoore first broke into the stalagmite floor which to a depth of three inches formed a continuous covering, like concrete, to the red clay and its deposits of flint implements, charred bones, and relics of the hyæna, mammoth, reindeer, bison, bear, wild cat, and a host of other animals utterly extinct.
Above these relics of an almost incredible antiquity was a layer of black earth containing remains of the British and Roman periods, odds and ends of whetstones, spindle-wheels, bone awls and chisels, amber beads, bronze rings, pieces of Samian pottery, and cakes of smelted copper, intermingled with shells of sea-fish and bones of pigs, sheep, rats, rabbits, and birds; the discarded things of periods of occupation ranging from two thousand years ago; but, compared with the deposits of from ten to twenty thousand years earlier, beneath the stalagmite flooring, things merely of yester-year.
Northmoore’s discoveries, however, were few in comparison with those of the Rev. J. MacEnery, who, as Roman Catholic chaplain at Tor Abbey, had abundant leisure, and devoted three years, from 1825, to explorations here. He saw a sight that would have doubtless roused a dentist to wildest enthusiasm. Nothing less than “the finest fossil teeth I had ever seen.” He was followed by Pengelly, and by the long series of researches by the British Association, extending from 1864 to 1880, which resulted in the almost complete stripping of the cavern; so that we who explore Kent’s Cavern, the home of Prehistoric Man, to-day are very much in the position of visitors to a house that has had the brokers in, or a museum whose exhibits have been nearly all removed.
But there are still remains discovered which recall Pengelly’s description of the cave being tenanted at the same period both by men and wild animals; the cave-men going forth to fish or hunt and the hyænas looking in during their absence for anything worth picking up. And there are things belonging to remote geological periods which are of those discoveries that first upset the chronology of the Book of Genesis and gave staggering shocks to believers in the absolute literal accuracy of the Bible: teeth of wild animals, not merely in the deposits of the floor, but embedded in the limestone rock overhead. Who shall put a date to these?
And here, at our elbow all the while, is the guide, complacently pointing to all these things; lighting flares which disclose the roof, and playing scales with sticks on metallic-sounding stalactites that have been forming with incredible slowness, perhaps an inch in a thousand years, just to be made a show of. The best of all the stalactites is broken. It began to be formed when the world was young. It grew and grew with the drops of water, charged with lime, percolating from the roof, and being met by its fellow stalagmite with equal slowness rising from the floor. And stalactite and stalagmite had nearly met, and only wanted another three or four centuries to bridge the remaining interval of an eighth of an inch, when a visitor, falling accidentally against them, broke them off!
“What did you say?” one, with pardonable curiosity, asks the guide, and “What could you say?” says he; and when you consider it, what is there that would be equal to that tremendous occasion?
