Presumably the St. Clement of these caves which have been variously ascribed to the Romans and the Danes, was a relative of St. Clement Dane in London by St. Dunstan in the West: the Hastings Caves are situated over what is marked on the Ordnance map as Torfield, and as this is immediately adjacent to a St. Andrew it is probable that the Anderida range, which commences hereby and terminates at the Chislehurst Caves, was all once dedicated to the ancient and eternal Ida. Antre is a generic term for cave, and as trou means hole, the word antrou is also equivalent to old hole. When first visiting the famous Merlin’s Cave at Tintagel or Dunechein, where it is said that Arthur or Artur, the mystic Mighty Child, was cast up by the ninth wave into the arms of the Great Magician, my companion’s sense of romance received a nasty jar on learning that Merlin’s Cave was known locally as “The Old Hole”: it may be, however, that this term was an exact rendering of the older Keltic antrou, which is literally old hole: the Tray Cliff in Derbyshire, where is situated the Blue John Mine, may well have been the trou cliff.
The highest point of the highland covering St. Clement’s Caves is known as “The Ladies’ Parlour”; at the foot of this is Sandringham Hotel, whence—in view of the neighbouring St. Andrew and Tor field—it is possible that “Sandringham”[944] was here, as elsewhere, a home of the children of Sander: immediately adjacent is a Braybrook, and a Bromsgrove Road. Near Reigate is a Broome Park which we are told “in the romantic era rejoiced in the name of Tranquil Dale”:[945] the neighbouring Buckland, Boxhill, and Pixhome Lane may be connoted with Bexhill by Hastings, and there are further traditional connections between the two localities. Under the dun upon which stand the remains of Reigate Castle are a series of caves, and besides the series of caves under the castle there are many others of much greater dimensions to the east, west, and south sides:[946] my authority continues, “Here many of the side tunnels are sealed up; one of these is said to go to Reigate Priory—which is possible—but another which is reputed to go to Hastings, impels one to draw the line somewhere”.[947]
We have seen that Brom and Bron were obviously once one and the same, and there is very little doubt that the Bromme of Broompark or Tranquil Dale was the same Peri or Power as was presumably connected with Purley, and as the Bourne or Baron associated with Reigate. In one of the Reigate caverns is a large pool of clear water which is said to appear once in seven years, and is still known as Bourne water:[948] under the castle is a so-called Baron’s Cave which is about 150 feet long, with a vaulted roof and a circular end with a ledge or seat around it. In popular estimation this is where the Barons met prior to the signing of Magna Charta: possibly they did, and without doubt many representatives of The Baron—good, bad, bold, and indifferent—from time to time sat and conferred upon the same ledge. From the Baron’s Cave a long inclined plane led to a stairway of masonwork which extended to the top of the mound.
Reigate now consists of a pair of ancient Manors, of which one was Howleigh; the adjacent Agland Moor, as also Oxted, suggests the troglodyte King Og of Edrei. Among the Reigate caves is one denominated “The Dungeon”: Tintagel was known alternatively not only as Dundagel, but also as Dunechein, evidently the same word as the great Dane John tumulus at Canterbury. The meaning of this term depends like every other word upon its context; a dungeon is a down-under or dene hole, the keep or donjon of a castle is its main tower or summit: similarly the word dunhill is identical with dene hole; abyss now means a yawning depth, but on page 224 Abyss was represented as a dunhill.
From the cavern at Pentonville, known as Merlin’s Cave, used to run a subterranean passage: modern Pentonville takes its title from a ground landlord named Penton, a tenant who presumably derived his patronymic either from that particular penton or from one elsewhere. In connection with the term pen it is curious to find that at Penselwood in Somerset there are what were estimated to be 22,000 “pen pits”: these pits are described as being in general of the form which mathematicians term the frustrum of a cone, not of like size one with another, but from 10 to 50 feet over at top and from 5 to 20 feet in the bottom.[949] I have already surmised that the various Selwoods, Selgroves, and Selhursts were so named because they contained the cells of the austere selli: by Penselwood is Wincanton, a place supposed to have derived its title from “probably a man’s name; nasalised form of Hwicca, cf. Whixley, and see ton”; but in view of the innumerable cone-shaped cells hereabout, it would seem more feasible that canton meant cone town. We have already illustrated the marvellous cone tomb said to have once existed in Etruria: in connection with this it is further recorded that within the basement King Porsenna made an inextricable labyrinth, into which if one ventured without a clue, there he must remain for he never could find the way out again; according to Mrs. Hamilton Gray the labyrinth of a counterpart of this tomb still exists, “but its locality is unascertained”.
There are said to be pits similar to the Wincanton pen pits in Berkshire, there known as Coles pits: we have already connoted St. Nichol of the tub-miracle, likewise King Cole of the Great Bowl with Yule the Wheel or Whole. The Bowl of Cole was without doubt the same as the pair dadeni, or Magic Cauldron of Pwyll which Arthur “spoiled” from Hades: with Paul’s Cray may be connoted the not-far-distant Pol Hill overlooking Sevenoaks. Otford, originally Ottanford, underlies Pol Hill, which was no doubt a dun of the celestial Pol, alias Pluto, or Aidoneus: in the graveyard at Ottanford may be seen memorials of the Polhill family, a name evidently analogous to Penton of Pentonville.
The memory of our ancestors dwelling habitually in either pen pits, dene holes, or cole pits, has been preserved in Layamon’s Brut, where it is recorded: “At Totnes, Constantin the fair and all his host came ashore; thither came the bold man—well was he brave!—and with him 2000 knights such as no king possessed. Forth they gan march into London, and sent after knights over all the kingdom, and every brave man, that speedily he should come anon. The Britons heard that, where they dwelt in the pits, in earth and in stocks they hid them (like) badgers, in wood and in wilderness, in heath and in fen, so that well nigh no man might find any Briton, except they were in castle, or in burgh inclosed fast. When they heard of this word, that Constantin was in the land, then came out of the mounts many thousand men; they leapt out of the wood as if it were deer. Many hundred thousand marched toward London, by street and by weald all it forth pressed; and the brave women put on them men’s clothes, and they forth journeyed toward the army.”
It has been assumed that the means of exit from the dene holes, and from the subterranean city with which they communicated, was a notched pole, and it is difficult to see how any other method was feasible: in this connection the Mandan Indians of North America have a curious legend suggestive of the idea that they must have sprung from some troglodite race. The whole Mandan nation, it is said, once resided in one large village underground near a subterranean lake; a grape-vine extended its roots down to their habitation and gave them a view of the light. Some of the most adventurous climbed up the vine and were delighted with the sight of the earth which they found covered with buffalo and rich with every kind of fruit: men, women, and children ascended by means of the vine (the notched pole?), but when about half the nation had attained the surface of the earth a big or buxom woman, who was clambering up the vine, broke it with her weight and closed upon herself and the rest the light of the Sun. There is seemingly some like relation between this legend and the tradition held by certain hill tribes of the old Konkan kingdom in India, who have a belief that their ancestors came out of a cave in the earth. In connection with this Konkan tale, and with the fact that the Concanii of Spain fed on horses, it may here be noted that not only do traces of the horse occur in the most ancient caves, but that vast deposits of horse bones point to the probability that horses were eaten sacrificially in caves.[950] In the Baron’s Cave at Reigate, “There are many bas relief sculptures, Roman soldiers’ heads, grotesque masks of monks, horses’ heads and other subjects which can only be guessed at”:[951] these idle scribblings have been assigned to the Roman soldiery, who are supposed at one time to have garrisoned the castle, and the explanation is not improbable: the favourite divinity of the Roman soldiery was Mithra, the Invincible White Horse, and several admittedly Mithraic Caves have been identified in Britain.[952] It has always been supposed that these were the work of Roman invaders, and in this connection it should be noted that deep in the bowels of the Chislehurst labyrinth there is a clean-cut well about 70 feet deep lined with Roman cement: but granting that the Romans made use of a ready-made cave, it is improbable that they were responsible for the vast net-work of passages which are known to extend under that part of Kent. There is—I believe—a well in the heart of the Great Pyramid; a deep subterranean well exists in one of the series of caves at Reigate.
In his article on the Chislehurst Caves Mr. Nichols inquires, “might not the shafts of these dene holes have lent themselves to the study of the heavenly bodies?” That the Druids were adepts at astronomy is testified by various classical writers, and according to Dr. Smith there are sites in Anglesey still known in Welsh as “the city of the Astronomers,” the Place of Studies, and the Astronomers’ Circle.[953] There was a famous Holy Well in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, and it would almost seem that a well was an integral adjunct of the sacred duns: according to Miss Gordon “there is a well of unknown antiquity at Pentonville under Sadlers Wells Theatre (Clerkenwell), lined with masonry of ancient date throughout its entire depth, similar to the prehistoric wells we have already mentioned in the Windsor Table Mound, on the Wallingford Mound, and the Well used by the first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich”.[954] But masonry-lined wells situated in the very bowels of the earth as at Chislehurst and Reigate cannot have served any astronomic purpose; they must, one would think, have been constructed principally for ritualistic reasons. At Sewell, near Dunstable, immediately next to Maiden Bower there once existed a very remarkable dene hole: this is marked on the Ordnance Maps as “site of well,” but in the opinion of Worthington Smith, “this dene hole was never meant for a well”. It was recently destroyed by railway constructors who explored it to the depth of 116 feet; but, says Worthington Smith, “amateur excavators afterwards excavated the hole to a much greater depth and found more bones and broken pots. The base has never been reached. The work was on the top of a very steep and high bank.”[955] On Mount Pleasant at Dunstable was a well 350 feet deep,[956] and any people capable of sinking a narrow shaft to this depth must obviously have been far removed from the savagery of the prime.