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 had heard tell of a cave in the Quantocks. But the information we relied on, though a century old, was definite enough to warrant the hire of a trap to convey us and our apparatus to a certain lonely cross-road, seven miles away, in a corner of the broad parish of Bloomfield. Climbing steadily through Enmore, we found the cross-road on a hilltop 800 feet above the sea, hard by a homely tavern, where we got cider for ourselves and feed for the horse. To our west was the Beacon on Cotherstone Hill, and two miles farther the Fire Signal Pits on Will's Neck (1261 feet), the highest of the Quantock Hills. But of the red-deer country that lay around us we saw little, and less as the day wore on, for a cold sea-mist came rolling up from the Bristol Channel, and would have given us trouble in finding our cave, had not a guide appeared providentially. It was a tattered and weather-beaten countryman, who emerged from the tap-room and announced that he was the only person who knew anything about the cave. He dilated in glowing terms on its beauties--"It be very ornamental, sur, very ornamental." Fox by name and fox by nature, so he described himself--for he was both garrulous and egotistical--he was fond of burrowing into holes. That he was a poacher to boot, we had no reason to disbelieve after a few minutes' conversation. He led us by a veritable fox's path over fields and hedges, through a mist-drenched spinney, down to a dingle, where beetle-browed rocks overhung the entrance to the cave. A rusty iron gate barred the way, and was padlocked. Reynard proposed to make a journey of several miles, at our expense, to procure the key; but a broken link in the chain saved us time and cider.

There is not much Limestone on the Quantocks, and caves are a rarity. At this spot an outlier of Carboniferous Limestone lies in close contact with beds of Greywacke Slate--a very unusual conjunction, which prepared us for something new and strange in the way of crystallisations. Descending a few yards beyond the entrance, the main passage rises a little, and then drops gradually towards a stagnant pool, beyond which it is impossible to get. The length of this portion is only 140 feet, and the direction from north-east to south-west. Certain narrow passages, however, bore into the Limestone on the north, and extend their ramifications much farther. Only one of these seems to have been known before our visit. In the main passage, near the pool, is seen the special wonder of Holwell Cave, a brilliant display of arragonite crystals all over the roof. Arragonite usually occurs in massive deposits of satin spar, distinguished by a perfection of whiteness when newly split, a whiteness that grows dingy very soon if you try to keep specimens. Here it occurs in quite another form--the coralloid, known as flos ferri; thousands of filaments or spicules ramifying from centres, and looking as soft as cobweb, though as brittle as blown glass. This delicate product is often tinged with a pink stain like that of fluor-spar. Andrew Crosse, the electrician, who was carrying on his researches in the neighbourhood when Holwell Cavern was found about 1800, thought that the crystal might have been distorted by slow degrees into these fanciful shapes "through the invisible action of electric energy," an agent to which most mysterious natural processes have been attributed some time or another; but the fibrous arragonite, scientists tell us, is by no means abnormal. It all lies on the Greywacke part of the roof; the adjoining Limestone has no arragonite, but is incrusted with the usual sheets and bosses of calcite, mutilated somewhat by visitors who have taken away mementos.

"Ain't it ornamental, sur?" said our conductor; but his exclamations were still more enthusiastic when the magnesium ribbon lit up the millions of arragonite crystals that covered the roof with a glistering efflorescence. Then the flashlight blazed out, as our camera got into action, and the old man was speechless with amazement. He had known the cave, boy and man, all his life, but never before had he, or anyone else for that matter, gazed upon all its beauties. Several photographs were secured--among them the portrait of a sleeping bat clinging to the groining of calcite--and then the cave grew too smoky for further work. So we went off to explore.

First we climbed into an opening high up in the north wall. It seemed to run parallel with the main passage, and soon we beheld daylight in front. Ere we reached the open air, however, we came to a steep drop, and found that the branch had simply brought us back to the vestibule of the cavern. Another opening, near the entrance, running due north, proved more interesting, leading eventually to a bell chamber, floored, walled, and roofed with polished carbonate. Someone had reached this point twenty years ago, so dates and initials testified; but there were virgin passages branching off to left and right for us to investigate, as far as bodies of speleological slimness were admissible.

A squeeze through a crevice in the east wall led into a parallel tunnel, depressingly low and painfully narrow, which seemed to run on indefinitely to the north. The soft clay floor showed it was at times the path of a heavy stream. Northward, it shrank to a mere drain-pipe; southward it led by one joint and culvert to another, all at right angles, into other straight channels, all going in the same general direction. My companion stuck fast a little way beyond the first tunnel; I pushed on like a weevil into the maze of perforations, but met the same fate at last, not giving in, however, until I had been held as in a vice at one point for a good five minutes, with boot jammed, candle out, and no room to get my hand to the pocket where the waterproof matches were safely stowed away.

It was still possible to see a long way ahead, by candlelight and magnesium; and we made out that north of the known cave lies a whole network of dry waterways, the principal channels running due north, roughly parallel to the Limestone escarpment in which the cave mouth opens, and all connected together by rectangular branches. One channel brought us within view of daylight; but the crevice was too small for anything but a rabbit, and we had to return by the same arduous and abrading passages we had come by. As old Fox would have said, the things we saw were "very handsome," but we could not tempt him to enter this uncomfortable region.

E. A. B.

CAVE EXPLORING AT ABERGELE

Travellers on the North-Western to Holyhead or Snowdonia are familiar with several cave mouths that form a prominent feature in the Limestone cliffs above Lord Dundonald's castle, near the station of Llandulas. The most conspicuous is a vast antre near the cliff-top; and legend has it that this opens into passages running for great distances, and eventually descending beneath the sea. (Welsh cave-myths are not less extravagant than those of Derbyshire and Somerset, where stories of dogs, geese, and other animals that have made long pilgrimages underground and come into daylight again divested of feathers or hair, are still piously cherished by the credulous.) The name attached to this group of caves, Tanyrogo--"under the cave"--is derived from the Celtic ogo or ogof, a cavern, and is almost identical with the original name of Wookey Hole in Somerset. A party of explorers from Liverpool and Colwyn Bay have recently carried out some researches in the Tanyrogo caves, and in those at St. George, on the other side of Abergele; and while verifying their disbelief in the supposed extent of the subterranean galleries, have ascertained many interesting facts as to the formation and the geological history of both series.

A grassy terrace runs along the cliff face to the gaping portal of the Ogo, the biggest of the Tanyrogo caves, which looks seaward and commands a magnificent view over the coast and the Irish sea. The prehistoric men who doubtless lived here once showed not only good taste in the choice of a site for their residence, but a judicious eye for military possibilities; the place is all but impregnable, save by starvation, the only access being by this narrow ledge, which a handful of men could defend against an army. Spanned by a noble arch is a colossal vestibule, rock-floored and dry. But this imposing entrance is a deception--there is nothing beyond to compare with its shape and magnitude. We swerved to the left, and at once found ourselves treading a floor of wet clay, which began to ascend, and soon steepened into a high bank leading up towards the roof. Creeping under an arch, we found ourselves in a transverse fissure that may have run as far as the legends pleased, but grew too narrow in a few feet for any human being to penetrate farther. A few rudimentary stalactites and a crust of pure white calcite adorned one small grotto; the rest was bare rock walls and rugged arches, springing here and there high into the darkness, in fissures that must reach very nearly to the summit of the cliff. A branch passage dwindled away still more quickly, and so did a minor opening that looks like a side door to the main entrance.

The rock structure of the cave arches is displayed in very beautiful ways in this cavern, but the most interesting feature is the remnant of an old cave floor. The cavern was evidently formed in pre-Glacial times, and the vast quantities of clay that plug it up almost entirely now must have been carried in by the ice. After the glaciers had receded, the normal agencies began their work again; a stalagmite floor was formed by the drip of water from the roof, depositing a layer of calcite; this in the course of time was broken down again, and now leaves a kind of high-water mark all round the walls of the cavity.

The line of the fissure creating the upward chasms inside the cave can be traced in the external configuration of the cliff; in sundry vertical openings in the face, and in the clean-cut walls, where sheer masses have fallen away, broken at the joints. Similar joints and fissures played a part in the formation of a lower tier of caves, which we explored next. The first was only a yard or two wide, but very lofty, and its floor was composed of a level bed of sand and clay. This gradually rose as we walked into the darkness, until the cave ended more abruptly even than the last. We noticed pebbles of Bunter sandstone in the floor, and the next cave produced many more examples of the same stone, which must have been brought from a long distance, the nearest strata corresponding to it being in Wirral. At the back of this next cave a bank of cave earth and boulder clay was piled right up to the roof, so steeply that it was not too easy a climb to the summit. Arrived there, we found no possible egress; but a horizontal tunnel, a sort of squint or hagioscope probably more than forty feet long, gave us a peep through the rocky cliff out to the sunlight. We set out forthwith to discover the outside orifice of this curious hole, and found it came out on a ledge in the face of the cliff, hard by an open platform which had a very queer look about it. On examination this proved to be the floor of an old cave that had been destroyed by the quarrymen. Half-embedded in thick clay were a number of stalagmite pedestals, and a floor of stalagmite underneath several feet in depth, surmounting a thick bed of boulder clay stuck full of Bunter pebbles. It was obvious that the quarrymen, coming across this mass of useless material, had not troubled to attack the solid layer of stalagmite above it. The remains of stalactites and stalagmite curtains still adhered to the neighbouring cliff.

The spot is well worth visiting, if only to see this remarkable illustration of several consecutive chapters in the history of a cavern. The destructive work of the Limestone quarry, having been checked at this particular point, exposes the whole thing as in a diagram; and the actual evidences are there just as they were produced by the forces acting in successive epochs--the mouth of the original cave, formed perhaps in pre-Triassic times; the masses of drift thrust in by the glaciers; and the new cave floor, with its growth of stalagmites. Since the caves lie at a height of several hundred feet above sea-level, it is fairly certain that the moving glaciers exerted an upward as well as a horizontal force, shoving the plastic masses of clay and débris into the ascending passages, and caulking up, no doubt, a good many tributary galleries that are now unknown. The caves look north, and the material pushed into them must have come from seaward; there is, furthermore, no rock in the adjoining districts that could have yielded this kind of pebbles: so that it appears the stream of glaciers which flowed across from Lancashire and Cheshire, impinging against the contrary flow of ice from Snowdonia, must be held responsible for the presence of these dense deposits. All along the meadow-lands between the Limestone hills and the sea a series of risings or big springs are noticeable from the railway, forming large pools. These are the outlets of the drainage that has been absorbed by the Limestone strata, through which the water has found its way until, meeting with an impermeable layer of rock, or reaching the plane of saturation at sea-level, it has been forced to the surface.

The St. George's Caves are situated on and about a wooded hill of Limestone near the village, which adjoins the low-lying lands of Morfa Rhuddlan, the scene of a murderous battle in the year 795. The Celt, with his strong historical imagination, such a factor in national solidarity, still remembers, though confusedly perhaps, some incidents of that calamitous fight. The old woman who pointed out the situation of the caves drew our attention to the ditch and rampart which run round the hillcrest, where it is not protected by cliffs. There, she said, the routed Welsh tribes had entrenched themselves and fought desperately on until every man was put to the sword. The wood on the hilltop is full of graves, she told us, and weapons often come to light there.

A great master-joint or fissure runs across the hill towards the battlefield, and in it lie the caves, or rather the cave, for so far as we could make out they are all parts of one stream-channel. At the top of a cliff that is now being worked for lime is a small orifice, a mere fox's hole, blocked up against Master Reynard or the badgers that often find a home in these small caves. A hundred feet beneath it is a larger opening, which is said to give entrance into several good-sized chambers; but that also has been carefully built up with fragments of Limestone by the quarrymen. We were driven accordingly to seek the outlet of the cave, and this we found by following the smooth, straight escarpment, produced by the fault, in a wood close to the mainroad. A large stream once issued from the cave mouth, but has since become engulfed in some internal swallet, and emerges a few yards lower down, welling out from a funnel of crystal water some 15 feet deep. The cave itself discharges a stream only in flood-time. There, too, we were stopped from penetrating far by the beds of clay that gradually rose to the cave roof; but in this instance the deposits had been made by the stream, and were not the results of glacial action pushing upwards. In fact, this is a cave with quite a modern history, one still in working order, and used as a waterway at the proper times and seasons by the stream that made it. The Tanyrogo Caves, on the other hand, have ceased for untold ages to be actual water-channels, having been deprived long ago by denudation above and behind them of the greater part of their drainage area. And since that remote epoch they have gone through the series of vicissitudes so plainly recorded in their present physiognomy.

CAVE DISCOVERIES ON THE WELSH BORDER

The other day, a Liverpool friend, who has a bungalow in the Ceiriog Valley, close to Offa's Dyke, told me he had found a cave there, which had never been explored, but was reputed to go six miles underground, to the neighbourhood of Oswestry. He invited me to come down and explore it, and I readily agreed, on the condition that he was to seize the opportunity to make his début as a cave explorer. On the side of the valley where the cave lies the hill falls steeply to the Ceiriog, and the densely-wooded cliff of Limestone that bathes its foot in the river is like a bit of Dovedale. Not so the other side of the valley, where different strata crop out, and the hills, with all their trees, rise more gently to the brow overlooking Llangollen.

The cave mouth is about 20 feet above the river, in a cliff facing due north, in which the Limestone is tilted at an angle of 45 degrees. It is recessed within a lofty arch, but the entrance itself is low, compelling us to creep for the first few yards. After two or three bends, the roof as well as the floor rises, and the passage opens into a chamber whose floor is heaped up to a height of 10 feet with fallen débris, thickly plastered with mud. At first the cave runs due south, but the main axis of this chamber, which is lofty and measures about 20 feet by 20, runs east-south-east. The roof rises about 20 feet higher than the central heap of débris. Water drips occasionally, but there are no stalactites. At the far end the passage turns south-east, and, though lofty, is narrow, the walls being parallel, and tilted at an angle of 20 degrees from the perpendicular. Then a second chamber widens out, 50 feet long by 6 feet broad, as muddy as the former. Rising 10 feet, the passage continues to the east-south-east, but the walls converge for a time, forcing us to crawl, extended on our sides. Then it opens out again, and we climb over more heaps of débris littering the floor, and all bedaubed with thick, tenacious clay.

Now the passage becomes loftier but narrower, and progress has to be made by keeping near the roof, the walls sloping at an angle of 30 degrees from the vertical, opening at one point into a small chamber with a false floor of jammed rocks, then immediately closing again, and so continuing for a distance of 60 feet. The narrowness is so great that one goes ahead only by dint of a continuous struggle against friction. Up to this, my friend had kept close at my heels, followed by his man. But here the only way visible was down a still narrower rift bending off to the left, and the latter found his own diameter greater than that of the cave. We left him, and pushed obstinately forward, though we had not seen a sign of any person's former presence for a long distance. Nearer the cave mouth matches and candle-grease and the marks of crawling had been plentiful, local adventurers having got in nearly 100 feet.

Already we had struck the water in two or three places, but had not found it in the main passage. Now we crossed a long pool or runnel of stagnant water, which came in from under the rocks to the south-east, and climbed into a tight little curving tunnel that led back to it in a semi-circle. Beyond it, I found myself in a rift chamber, with the water coming in from under the rocks at one end, and flowing out in like manner at the other. There seemed to be no egress, till suddenly I noticed that the niche in which I was sitting was the end of a small horizontal hole or dry water-pipe, striking off at right angles. But my companion had found the tunnel too much for him. The sides bristled with points of rock, and pressed in so close that one could only wriggle through by fractions of an inch, stretched at full length on the left side. Now he made a stout attempt to get through underneath, in the water tunnel. I heard the sound of wallowing, and then my friend's head and shoulders came splashing in at the bottom of the cave, his body dragging after through water and mud. But again he stuck fast, and announced that he would give the thing up.

It was not wise to go on far alone, for fear of being left by any accident without a light; but in order to make a reconnaissance for future work I pushed through the water-pipe, and to my delight found myself in another horizontal tunnel running parallel to the main chamber. Crawling ahead, first over a clay-lined floor, and then over splinters of Limestone mixed with stalagmites, I emerged presently into an open passage, 25 or 30 feet high, with the stream peacefully reposing in one long pool at the bottom. It appeared to go on indefinitely, and I might have gone farther, but for the present determined to leave off the exploration at this point. The parallel tunnel seemed to be going straight back towards the cave mouth, and it looked as though it might form a short cut home. As a matter of fact, this was a right branch striking off from the point where our man had stuck fast. By crawling in his direction and shouting, I made him hear, and at last saw his light through a chink only three inches wide. Fallen blocks of Limestone choked the tunnel at his end, where it leaves the main passage near the roof, and in its present state this branch of the cave was practically invisible. We shifted several big stones, however, and in a few minutes my friend joined me, pleased enough to find a way out that saved the discomforts of his recent journey. He had had the misfortune to array himself in white flannels, and now the state of his garments was so deplorable that he straightway hid himself in the river, like the pseudo Marquis of Carabas, until more presentable clothing could be fetched.