GREAT RIFT CAVERN, CHEDDAR GORGE.
Photo by Bamforth, Holmfirth.
The next cave also is of minor interest to the speleologist, although it contains many curious sights. It is called "Gough's Old Cavern," and its entrance is close to the mouth of the Great Cavern. It is an ascending cleft, apparently not linked at present with the other caves, although it was once probably a sloping aven draining into the big series of caverns that have been gradually cut back by the falling in of the defile. Whoever likes such things may find here plenty of those freaks and alleged similitudes that puzzle and delight the ordinary sightseer. On a stalagmite excrescence nicknamed the "Ribs of Beef" we had the luck to see a far more interesting phenomenon. The calcite mass was clustered over with a number of motionless black objects, which we found to be roosting bats, hanging head downwards by their claws. They were not disturbed in the least by our presence, and one that was lifted off gently just showed his teeth and claws, and clung on again as fast as ever when replaced on the rock to resume his patient sleep. A photograph of this curious sight was obtained by means of the flashlight. At the head of the cave are several incrusted grottoes, where the process of deposition is still going on, roof and walls streaming with moisture. This part is not unlike the show places in the Bagshawe Cavern in the Peak of Derbyshire.
In many respects the Roman Cave is much more interesting. Its mouth is situated about 150 feet up the cliffs, almost immediately over the cave just described. Quantities of Roman pottery, coins, bones, and other remains, have been discovered there, showing it to be one of the places that sheltered fugitives after the evacuation of Britain by the Roman legions. The entrance is a broad anticlinal arch, and the main passage, high-roofed and ascending gradually, runs east for perhaps a furlong. Then the floor, which has been covered with earth and stones, becomes rugged and rock-strewn, and suddenly we creep through a lowly portal into a high and gloomy chamber, the shadowy corners of whose roof our lights are too feeble to explore. To all appearances this was the end of the cavern; but we had been told that the passage takes a turn here and goes on nearly a quarter of a mile farther. We scanned every part of the walls as far up as we could see, but no accessible opening disclosed itself. In a recess on one side a number of fallen rocks were piled up and wedged between the converging walls. To examine the cavity from a vantage spot, we climbed with a good deal of difficulty to the top of these, and there, to our astonishment, a wide passage sloped up at right angles to the one we had entered by. A curious slit in the wall opened into a perpendicular fissure that was situated right in the roof of the latter, and through the hole we caught a glimpse of our friends following us up. Three men now pushed on up the new passage and entered a chamber whose sole exit was a small and uninviting hole. We crawled and scraped through, and on over sharp stones till at last we could get no farther. We had evidently doubled back over the main cavern, and that we could not be far from the open air was shown by the presence of a bewildered bat, who flew to and fro in the confined space and hit us in the face several times. And in the extreme recess of this narrow branch a steady draught of air blew in through a crevice and nearly put the lights out. Through an oversight we found ourselves at this point reduced to two tapers and a bit, and to economise we kept only one alight at a time, so as to have enough for the return journey. All went well, however, and the sole difficulty we met with was in getting down over the wedged blocks in the big chamber, a climb that proved extremely awkward when taken the reverse way. In many parts of this cavern we noticed prodigious quantities of moths on the walls, as well as many huge spiders. But a more interesting thing was the vegetation naturalised in the caves, examples of which we found in other Mendip caverns as well. It will be advisable to have them examined by a botanical specialist. All I can say about them now is that they consist of extremely slender branching tendrils, some white and translucent, others brownish, thin as cotton.
It was late in the afternoon when we entered the Roman Cavern; it was dark now, and the stars were out. Returning in advance of the others, I sat down just within the majestic gateway of the cavern, a flattened arch about 100 feet wide resting on enormous rocky jambs, and looked out across the deep wooded abyss where Cheddar lay, its lights reflected here and there by the dark waters of the mere, towards the craggy heights of Mendip opposite, just sinking down towards Sedgemoor. The Great Bear was shining brightly right in front—it almost spanned the breadth of the cave mouth; and the solemnity of the place and the hour could not but bring to mind the miserable fugitives who sat in this forlorn asylum, hemmed in by foes, and looked out on the same giant constellation thrice five hundred years ago. The place is admirably adapted for defence. A rear attack was of course impossible, whilst a frontal attack by way of the cliffs would be easily repelled; and a tolerable water-supply was to be found inside the cavern. The huge natural glacis of the fortress is covered to-day with a dense tangle of ivy and other climbers, through which we made our way heedfully, for a slip would have been easy in the dark, and a terrible fall the consequence.
Next morning we strolled up the defile and looked at the mouths of several caves that are now choked up. Two furlongs above its entrance the ravine makes a double curve like a gigantic figure three. The two crescents of beetling Limestone, with their jutting horns, that appear to the astonished beholder underneath like towering pyramids and slim aiguilles, rise to a vertical height of 430 feet, and, being absolutely unassailable, they fill a crag climber's mind with admiration tempered by regret. What enhances their grandeur, while it softens the savage aspect of the sheer and ledgeless precipice, is the bountiful vegetation clinging wherever it can find a hold, dark shrouds of ivy and darker masses of yew standing out against the grey rock in beautiful relief. Would the indomitable scramblers who haunt Lakeland at Easter, we asked ourselves, have forced a way up these tremendous "chimneys" if the Cheddar cliffs had been pitched somewhere in the latitude of Wastdale? We went so far as to reconnoitre one alluring fissure, 200 feet or more in length, but the gap between its base and the first feasible lodgment was insuperable. Not far away a long talus of scree marks the foot of an easy though rather sensational way to the cliff top. Passing it by, we stopped at the mouth of a vertical fissure that opens on to the roadway. It expands slightly inside, and the roof soars higher and higher; then the floor breaks away, and the two men who descended the next 80 feet had to be steadied by the rope. The walls were wet and soft, being incrusted with a sticky calcareous substance. At the bottom of the precipitous slope the magnesium ribbon revealed the enormously lofty walls of a narrow chamber, whose farther extent was blocked up by an accumulation of rocks and débris.
Returning to the open air, we ascended to the cliff top, and, skirting each promontory and rounding the edge of every bay, proceeded towards the mouth of the defile on the lookout for openings. Not far from the highest point we had noticed from the road a series of dark cavities. One man scrambled along a ledge to the uppermost of these, and found that it was merely a shallow niche, and another, on a ledge some 50 feet lower, proved to be only 20 feet deep. He made a determined effort to reach another fissure on the same level as the last but sundered from it by a wide space of cliff which was covered with dense brambles. Holding on to the prickly stems, and fighting his way through, he got near enough to see into the fissure, but was quite unable to enter it for a closer examination. An opening in the cliffs at a lower point, but still some 200 feet above the road, led a long way into the recesses of the Limestone strata, making two wide curves to the right, but maintaining a generally easterly direction. The passages were very low, narrow, and awkwardly shaped, involving a great deal of unpleasant crawling; and when we reached the stalagmite grotto at the end we found that it had been pillaged of every bit of calcite that could be removed. This cavern, the "Long Hole," must have been the channel of a stream that once flowed from somewhere on the other side of the gorge, through the mass of rock that has now been swept away by the forces of disintegration. Though several hundred feet long, it is but the tail end of the cavern that once existed.
The remainder of our time was devoted to two of the Burrington caverns, on the opposite side of the Mendip Hills, and to a fruitless search for a large chasm or swallet hole into which the drainage from the now abandoned lead mines on the top of Mendip used to fall and ultimately find its way to Cheddar, where it poisoned the trout stream. A score or more of years ago I saw these mines, still in working order; but now the dried-up pools and the wilderness of refuse, with fragments of ruined buildings, look as old almost as the remains of the Roman mines. Of the important opening that we sought there is now no trace; it may have been filled up intentionally and the stream allowed to revert to its old channel, whence it had been turned artificially. Hard by, in the Long Wood near Charterhouse, and elsewhere, there are smaller swallets that we were already acquainted with; and there are others at Priddy, the waters of which find an exit farther to the east.
The ground we were on is well known to readers of Walter Raymond's romances, and we were much interested when it was pointed out that the lonely house facing us was the actual Ubley Farm that figures in Two Men o' Mendip.