The name of this Istar-like or Star Deity is not recorded, but in this description she is alluded to as Mistress of the Turquoise Country, and later simply as Mistress of Turquoise. We may possibly arrive at the name of the British Lady of the star-shaped dene holes by reference to a votive tablet which was unearthed in 1647 near Zeeland: this is to the following effect:—
To the Goddess Nehalennia—
For his goods well preserved—
Secundus Silvanius
A chalk Merchant
Of Britain
Willingly performed his merited vow.
I am acquainted with no allusions in British mythology to Nehalennia, but she is recognisable in the St. Newlyna of Newlyn, near Penzance, and of Noualen in Brittany: it is not an unreasonable conjecture that St. Nehalennia of the Thames was a relative of Great St. Helen, and she was probably the little, young, or new Ellen. At Dunstable, where also there are dene holes, we find a Dame Ellen’s Wood, and it may be surmised that Nelly was originally a diminutive of Ellen.
Among the Bretons as among the Britons precisely the same mania for burrowing seems at one period to have prevailed, and in an essay on The Origin of Dene Holes, Mr. A. R. Goddard pertinently inquires: “What, then, were these great excavations so carefully concealed in the midst of lone forests?” Mr. Goddard points out that an interesting account of the use made of very similar places in Brittany by the peasant armies, during the war in La Vendee, is to be found in Victor Hugo’s Ninety Three, and that that narrative is partially historic, for it ends, “In that war my father fought, and I can speak advisedly thereof”. Victor Hugo writes: “It is difficult to picture to oneself what these Breton forests really were. They were towns. Nothing could be more secret, more silent, and more savage. There were wells, round and narrow, masked by coverings of stones and branches; the interior at first vertical, then horizontal, spreading out underground like funnels, and ending in dark chambers.” These excavations, he states, had been there from time immemorial, and he continues: “One of the wildest glades of the wood of Misdon, perforated by galleries and cells, out of which came and went a mysterious society, was called The Great City. The gloomy Breton forests were servants and accomplices of the rebellion. The subsoil of every forest was a sort of madrepore, pierced and traversed in all directions by a secret highway of mines, cells, and galleries. Each of these blind cells could shelter five or six men.”
The notion that the dene holes of Kent were built as refuges from the Danes, and that the tortuous souterrains of County Down were constructed by the defeated Danes as skulking holes is on a par with the supposition that the souterrains of La Vendee were built as an annoyance to the French Republic; and the idea that the solitary or combined dene holes situated in the heart of lone, dense, and inaccessible forests were due to action of the sea, or mere shafts sunk by local farmers simply for the purpose of obtaining chalk seems to me irrational and inadequate. It is still customary for hermits to dwell in caves, and in Tibet there are Buddhist Monasteries “where the inmates enter as little children, and grow up with the prospect of being literally immured in a cave from which the light of day is excluded as well as the society of their fellow-men, there to spend the rest of their life till they rot”: it is thus not impossible that each dene hole in Britain was originally the abode of a hermit or holy man, and that clusters of these sacred caves constituted the earliest monasteries. In Egypt near Antinoe there is a rock-hewn church known as Dayn Aboo Hannes, which is rendered by Baring-Gould as meaning “The Convent of Father John”: it would thus appear that in that part of the world dayn was the generic term for convent, and it is not unlikely that the ecclesiastical dean of to-day does not owe his title to the Greek word diaconus, but that the original deaneries were congeries of dene holes or dens. The mountains and deserts of Upper Egypt used to be infested with ascetics known as Therapeutæ who dwelt in caves, and the immense amount of stone which the extensive excavations provided served secondarily as material for building the pyramids and neighbouring towns: the word Therapeut, sometimes translated to mean “holy man,” and sometimes as “healer,” is radically thera or tera, and one of the most remarkable of the Egyptian cave temples is that situated at Derr or Derri.