Addington is situated in what is now Surrey, and is in close proximity to a place named Sanderstead: the Sander whose stead or enclosure here stood may be connoted with the French Santerre, which district abounds with souterrains: in the valley of the Somme alone there are at least thirty “singular excavations” which communicate with parish churches:[925] these Santerre and Sanderstead similarities may be connoted with the fact that on the coast of Durham are caverns hewn in the limestone and known as Dane’s holes.
In the forest of Tournehem near St. Omer are some curious square and circular fosses known locally as Fosses, Sarrasines, or Fosses des Inglais:[926] saracens is the name under which the Jews or Phœnicians are still known in Cornwall, and in view of the Tyrians love of burrowing or making trous, Tournehem may here perhaps be identified with Tyre, or the Tyrrhenians of Etruria. The Inglais can hardly be the modern English, but are more probably the prehistoric Ingles whose marvellous monument stands to-day at Mount Ingleborough in Yorkshire, or ancient Deira: this must have been a perfect Angel borough, or Eden, for not only is it a majestic hill crowned by a tower called the Hospice, and with other relics previously noted, but it also contains one of the most magnificent caverns in the kingdom. This is entered by a low wide arch and consists for the first 600 feet, or thereabouts, of a mere tunnel which varies in height from 5 to 15 feet: one then enters “a spacious chamber with surface all elaborated in a manner resembling the work of a Gothic cathedral in limestone formations of endless variety of form and size, and proceeds thence into a series of chambers, corridors, first made accessible in 1838, said to have an aggregate extent of about 2000 feet, and displaying a marvellous and most beautiful variety of stalactites and stalagmites. A streamlet runs through the whole, and helps to give purity to the air.”[927] This description is curiously reminiscent of the famous and gigantic Han Grotto near Dinant: with the Han Grotto, through which run the rivers Lesse and Tamise, may be connoted the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire, and I have little doubt that Han or Blue John, or Tarchon was the Giant originally worshipped by the Chouans or Jacks, who inhabited the terrible recesses of La Vendee. The name Joynson which occurs in the Kentish dene hole district implies possibly the son of a Giant, or a son of Sinjohn: it is not unlikely that the “Hangman’s” Wood, in which the group of dene holes here planned occur, was originally the Han, Hun, giant, or Hahnemann’s Wood. At Tilbury the spacious caverns were adjacent to Shenfield, in the neighbourhood of Downs Farm: at Dunstable is a little St. John’s Wood, a Kensworth, and a Mount Pleasant; this district is dotted with “wells,” and the adjacent Caddington is interpreted as having meant “the hill meadow of Cedd or Ceadda”.
Dinant or Deonant is generally supposed to derive its name from Diana, and we are told that the town originally possessed “onze eglises paroissales”. Whether these eleven parishes were due to chance or whether they were originally sacred to an elphin eleven must remain a matter of conjecture: at the entry to the Grotto in Dane Hill, Margate (Thanet), is a shell-mosaic yoni surmounted by an eleven-rayed star.
The association of “les Inglais” with the fosses in the forest of Tournehem may possibly throw some light upon the curiously persistent sixfold form in which our British dene holes seem invariably to have been constructed. Engelland as we have seen was the mystic Angel Land in which the unborn children of the future were awaiting incarnation: that six was for some reason associated with birth and creation is evident from the six days of Jewish tradition, and from the corresponding 6000 years of Etrurian belief. The connection between six and creation is even more pointed in the Druidic chant still current in Brittany, part of which has already been quoted:—
Beautiful child of the Druid, answer me right well.
What would’st thou that I should sing?
Sing to me the series of number one that I may learn it this very day.
There is no series for one, for One is Necessity alone.
The father of death, there is nothing before and nothing after.