[904] Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, pp. 70, 190. The italics are mine.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
DOWN UNDER.
“It is our duty to begin research even if we have to penetrate many a labyrinth leading to nowhere and to lament the loss of many a plausible system. A false theory negatived is a positive result.”—Thos. J. Westropp.
In the year 1585 a curious occurrence happened at the small hamlet of Mottingham in Kent: betimes in the morning of 4th August the ground began to sink, so much so that three great elm trees in a certain field were swallowed up into a pit of about 80 yards in circumference and by ten o’clock no part of them could be seen. This cavity then filled with water of such depth that a sounding line of 50 fathoms could hardly find or feel any bottom: still more alarming grew the situation when in an adjacent field another piece of ground sunk in like manner near the highway and “so nigh a dwelling house that the inhabitants were greatly terrified therewith”.[905]
To account for a subsidence much deeper than an elm tree one must postulate a correspondingly lofty soutterrain: the precise spot at Mottingham where these subsidences are recorded was known as Fairy Hill, and I have little doubt that like many other Dunhills this particular Fairy Hill was honeycombed or hollowed. Almost every Mottingham[906] or Maiden’s Home consisted not only of the characteristic surface features noted in the preceding chapter, but in addition the thoroughly ideal Maiden’s Home went down deep into the earth: in Ireland the children of Don were popularly reputed to dwell in palaces underground; similarly in Crete the Great Mother—the Earth Mother associated with circles and caves, the goddess of birth and death, of fertility and fate, the ancestress of all mankind—was assumed to gather the ghosts of her progeny to her abode in the Underworld.[907]
Caves and caverns play a prime and elementary part in the mythologies of the world: their role is literally vital, for it was believed that the Life of the World, in the form of the Young Sun, was born yearly anew on 25th December, always in a cave: thus caves were invariably sacred to the Dawn or God of Light, and only secondarily to the engulfing powers of Darkness; from the simple cell, kille, or little church gradually evolved the labyrinthine catacomb and the stupendous rock-temple.
The County of Kent is curiously rich in caves which range in importance from the mysterious single Dene Hole to the amazing honeycomb of caverns which underlie Chislehurst and Blackheath: a network of caves exists beneath Trinity Church, Margate; moreover, in Margate is a serpentine grotto decorated with a wonderful mosaic of shell-work which, so far as I am able to ascertain, is unique and unparalleled. The grotto at Margate is situated in the Dene or Valley underneath an eminence now termed Dane Hill: one of the best known of the Cornish so-called Giant’s Holts is that situated in the grounds of the Manor House of Pendeen, not in a dene or valley, but on the high ground at Pendeen Point. In Cornish pen meant head or point, whence Pendeen means Deen Headland, and one again encounters the word dene in the mysterious Dene holes or Dane holes found so plentifully in Kent: these are supposed to have been places of refuge from the Danes, but they certainly never were built for that purpose, for the discovery within them of flint, bone, and bronze relics proves them to be of neolithic antiquity.
There must be some close connection in idea between the serpentine grotto in The Dane, Margate, the subterranean chamber at Pendeen, Cornwall, the Kentish Dene Holes and the mysterious tunnellings in the neighbourhood of County Down, Ireland: these last were described by Borlase as follows: “All this part of Ireland abounds with Caves not only under mounts, forts, and castles, but under plain fields, some winding into little hills and risings like a volute or ram’s horn, others run in zigzag like a serpent; others again right forward connecting cell with cell. The common Irish think they are skulking holes of the Danes after they had lost their superiority in that Island.”[908] They may conceivably have served this purpose, but it is more probable that these mysterious tunnellings were the supposed habitations of the subterranean Tuatha te Danaan, i.e., the Children of Don or Danu.