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 latest of the sporting sciences: like orology and Arctic exploration, it has two sides, sport and adventure being the lure to some, whilst others are chiefly attracted by the new light thrown by these researches on the geology,

THE CAVE DISTRICT OF THE MENDIPS "A land of caves, whose palaces of fantastic beauty still adorn the mysterious underworld where murmuring rivers first see the light." In these words an imaginative writer describes Somerset, which shares with Derbyshire and Yorkshire the title of a land of caverns. Across it the range of the Mendips, a region of Old Red Sandstone and Carboniferous Limestone, 1000 feet above tide-level, stretches in a huge, flat-topped rampart for nearly 30 miles, from the town o

The great gorge of Cheddar and its caverns form a subject of surpassing interest to the student of Geology. Presenting some of the most stupendous cliff scenery in England, the great wall of rock on the southern side of the valley towers nearly 500 feet into the air, defying all attempts at mapping contour lines; and the road which traverses the ravine winds, with many a sudden turn, along the base of this noble cliff, ever upwards, until in four miles the actual summit of the Mendip downs is re

When we consider the question of the age of our caverns, we are met at the outset by a mass of evidence forcing upon us the certainty that they must be credited with a very high antiquity indeed. Here measurement by years and centuries fails, and the imagination must be called in to aid us to compute the epochs that have successively elapsed since the first cave, to take one example, began to be formed at Wookey Hole. These evidences are of three kinds: historical, palæontological, and geologica

We are called a nation of sportsmen; yet the first criticism we level against any new sport, not our own, is the question, usually unanswerable and always irrelevant, What is the use of it? One may then, with a certain show of propriety, point out that cave exploring is a sport not entirely lacking in utilitarian or scientific objects. It belongs, in fact, to that large class which originated as something else than mere pastime. Mountaineering and hunting are typical representatives of that clas

"Where Albion's western hills slope to the sea,  There is a cave, and o'er its dismal mouth,  Whence come to quick, mysterious ears hoarse sounds  Of giant revelry, the ivy grew  And shut the old sepulchral darkness in;  And by its side a well, whence ever full  And ever overflowing, silent, deep,  And cold as death, the waters creep  Adown the broken rocks in search of day.  Above it frowns a fretted, stony brow,  And only from the setting sun e'er came  Within that place the joyfulness of ligh

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 tract, with few trees dotted over its surface, but a thick belt of wood on the south, the dark green of which in summer, and the black stems in winter, make the grey landscape seem the more arid, gaunt, and desolate. The ruined engine house of a deserted lead mine does not add to the attractiveness of the scenery. But that

An insignificant crevice, a hole scarcely wide enough to tempt a dog or fox, alone gives admittance to what is perhaps the wildest and most magnificent cavern in Britain. Swildon's Hole, it has already been stated, lies at the same level, 780 feet above the sea, as the Eastwater Swallet and that of Hill Grove. It lies in a separate trough, within the same basin as the Eastwater stream, with whose waters it unites somewhere in the bowels of the rocky hills, to flow out of Wookey Hole as the river

The ultimate goal of our researches at Cheddar has been the discovery of the underground river-course. Not many yards below the entrance to Gough's, or the Great Cavern, a large body of water wells up at the foot of a cliff, spreading out into a beautiful mere, half encircled by crags; flows on thence through the village, performing a great deal of industrial work on its way; and, finally, proceeds a mile or two farther as the Cheddar Water, to join its brother, the Axe, which has a similar orig

The Cheddar gorge, which is the deepest and narrowest defile, and on its south side presents the loftiest face of absolutely vertical rock in England, is not dissimilar, though far superior in height and grandeur, to the Winnats pass in Derbyshire. The huge chasm runs east-north-east across the dip of the Limestone beds, which are tilted up towards the saddle of Mendip; one of its sides, consequently, is formed mainly of shelving rock, and the other is almost continuously precipitous. If, as may

Burrington Combe is a smaller Limestone defile on the north side of Mendip—that is to say, the opposite side to that of Cheddar. It is smaller, and because of its proximity to Cheddar it has to suffer disadvantageous comparisons. Anywhere else the grandeur of Burrington Combe, the magnificence of its crags, with dark, heather-clad Black Down lowering behind them, and the beauty of the copses that lurk in its corners and clamber up its precipices, would excite the admiration of guide-books and at

A cave just discovered near Compton Bishop, on the skirts of Mendip, furnishes valuable evidence in corroboration of the theory that the Limestone caverns of this region were formed at a period enormously anterior to that generally accepted. It is situated a little way up the slope of Wavering Down, only a short distance above the upper limit of the red marl laid down in the Triassic age, unconformably on the denuded edges of the Carboniferous Limestone. We had been engaged in some exploring wor

A few years ago the Great Western opened what they called the Wrington Vale Light Railway up the valley of the Yeo, which borders Mendip on the north. A few miles beyond its present terminus lie the two Harptrees, in the heart of a sequestered countryside of great pastoral beauty. Here, where nowadays all the pursuits are agricultural, a great deal of mining was carried on in years gone by, the relics of which are still visible in the surface workings, grown over with grass. In the upland ravine

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 th

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,

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 densel

The explorers who have done so much work in Derbyshire and Somersetshire have also carried out extended explorations in some of the more remote caves of Yorkshire. Recently a party carried out farther investigations than any previous explorers in Stump Cross Cavern, on the moors between Wharfedale and Nidderdale. This cavern, which is named after the ancient boundary mark of Knaresborough Forest, and is situated near the summit of the moors, 1326 feet above sea-level, 4½ miles from Pateley Bridg

Between Sparrowpit and the head of the Winnats the old road from Chapel-en-le-Frith to Castleton skirts what is, geologically, one of the most important localities in Derbyshire. It runs along the side of a shallow upland valley, about 1200 feet above tide-level and two miles long, which is bounded on two sides by the curve of Rushup Edge and on the other two by Elden Hill, Windy Knoll, and other Limestone acclivities. One of the great faults of the Pennine chain traverses this valley longitudin

The new and exciting game of cave-exploring has been pursued so strenuously during the last four years that one would almost think the possibilities of fresh discoveries had been exhausted. When a little while ago, therefore, rumours came in of a big cavern in Lathkill Dale, so big that people were said to have been lost in its recesses, they were received not a little incredulously. But after the usual allowances had been made for exaggeration and myth, and the alleged casualties reduced to the

Mitchelstown Cave, the largest ever discovered in the British Isles, is not situated at the town of that name, in county Cork, but 10 miles away, in Tipperary, on the road to Cahir. Its entrance is in a small Limestone hill in the broad vale of the Blackwater, midway between the Knockmealdown Mountains and the Sandstone ridges and tables of the Galtees. The cave was laid open in the course of quarrying operations in 1833, from which time to the present the work of exploration has gone on progres