Category: Adventure

The netherworld of Mendip

The objects of this work are twofold: to describe the actual incidents of various interesting episodes in the modern sport of cave exploring, and to give an account of the scientific results of underground investigations in the Mendip region of Somerset. Speleology is the late...

Chapters

9. Part 9

Next morning we strolled up the defile and looked at the mouths of several caves that are now choked up. Two furlongs above its entrance the ravine makes a double curve like a g...

12. Part 12

A veteran cave-hunter from Liverpool gladly joined me in a second visit to the Ceiriog Cavern. Our host could not be with us, but sent a village youth as his substitute. This yo...

2. Part 2

To enter either of the active swallets of Eastwater or Swildon's Hole, and to follow it to its greatest depth, is to gain an insight into the action of subterranean streams such...

8. Part 8

The Great Cavern was discovered in 1898. The parts open to visitors extend in a generally easterly direction for some 600 yards, and consist of natural chambers and passages, co...

4. Part 4

Caves are formed in calcareous strata by the chemical action of water laden with carbonic acid, and by the mechanical action of streams. In consequence of the original structure...

13. Part 13

Bull Pit lies in the wood just above this opening, nearer the road. It is a great open abyss, walled on three sides by crags of Limestone nearly a hundred feet high, and with tr...

10. Part 10

My stay underground was cut short by the fear that the others would grow impatient. I was hauled up without mishap, save that at one point the cotton rope stuck fast in a cleft,...

11. Part 11

At Bridgewater, where we had arrived one winter morning at sunrise, after a melancholious journey in unwarmed carriages across the flooded moors beyond Glastonbury, not a person...

6. Part 6

From two to three miles north of Wookey Hole, on the top of the Mendip tableland, is a broad, shallow valley, surrounded on every side by higher ground. It is a grey, desolate t...

3. Part 3

But when we consider the evidences furnished by the remains of the extinct mammalia, mingled with those of primitive man, much more is it impressed upon the mind that we are dea...

5. Part 5

Many things here bring to mind the Derbyshire cavern, which several of our party had explored pretty thoroughly before we did any serious work in Somerset--the approach along th...

7. Part 7

The water poured down a staircase of similar basins, where to keep clear of the stream was impossible. So far we had kept tolerably dry, but as we clung to this watery ladder I...

14. Part 14

What was done in the latter during the first year after the discovery may be read in an article by Dr. Apjohn in the _Dublin Penny Journal_ for December 27, 1834, an article rep...

1. Part 1

The objects of this work are twofold: to describe the actual incidents of various interesting episodes in the modern sport of cave exploring, and to give an account of the scien...