IN THE OGO, NEAR ABERGELE.
Photo by E. A. Baker.
The St. George's Caves are situated on and about a wooded hill of Limestone near the village, which adjoins the low-lying lands of Morfa Rhuddlan, the scene of a murderous battle in the year 795. The Celt, with his strong historical imagination, such a factor in national solidarity, still remembers, though confusedly perhaps, some incidents of that calamitous fight. The old woman who pointed out the situation of the caves drew our attention to the ditch and rampart which run round the hillcrest, where it is not protected by cliffs. There, she said, the routed Welsh tribes had entrenched themselves and fought desperately on until every man was put to the sword. The wood on the hilltop is full of graves, she told us, and weapons often come to light there.
A great master-joint or fissure runs across the hill towards the battlefield, and in it lie the caves, or rather the cave, for so far as we could make out they are all parts of one stream-channel. At the top of a cliff that is now being worked for lime is a small orifice, a mere fox's hole, blocked up against Master Reynard or the badgers that often find a home in these small caves. A hundred feet beneath it is a larger opening, which is said to give entrance into several good-sized chambers; but that also has been carefully built up with fragments of Limestone by the quarrymen. We were driven accordingly to seek the outlet of the cave, and this we found by following the smooth, straight escarpment, produced by the fault, in a wood close to the mainroad. A large stream once issued from the cave mouth, but has since become engulfed in some internal swallet, and emerges a few yards lower down, welling out from a funnel of crystal water some 15 feet deep. The cave itself discharges a stream only in flood-time. There, too, we were stopped from penetrating far by the beds of clay that gradually rose to the cave roof; but in this instance the deposits had been made by the stream, and were not the results of glacial action pushing upwards. In fact, this is a cave with quite a modern history, one still in working order, and used as a waterway at the proper times and seasons by the stream that made it. The Tanyrogo Caves, on the other hand, have ceased for untold ages to be actual water-channels, having been deprived long ago by denudation above and behind them of the greater part of their drainage area. And since that remote epoch they have gone through the series of vicissitudes so plainly recorded in their present physiognomy.
A PRE-GLACIAL CAVE, LLANDULAS.
Photo by E. A. Baker.