CHAP. 1. unfathomable depth of caves, seas, and fens, has always been a favourite Elden Hole. topic with the credulous and the ignorant: and this immense fissure was long thought to be bottomless. The philosopher Hobbes says, of an enormous piece of rock which he and his companions rolled to the mouth of the cavern, and then thrust it into the aperture:

Utima tum subiens, infandaque Tartara, centrum
Transit.

The lowest deep descending, it broke through
Hell and the center.

During the reign of Elizabeth, a poor man was hired by the famous Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to suffer himself to be let down by a rope into this cavern, and the event forms an amusing episode in Hobbes's Latin Poem, De Mirabilibus Pecci, which we shall give in the words of a translation made by a contemporary of the author.

""Tis said great Dudley to this cave came down,
In great Eliza's reign a peer well known.

He a poor peasant for a petty price
With rope around his middle does entice,
And pole in hand, like her, Sarissa hight,
And basket full of stones down to be let
And pendulous to hang i' th' midst o' th' cave;
Thence casting stones, intelligence to have,
By list'ning, of the depth of this vast hole.
The trembling wretch descending, with his pole
Puts back the rocks, that else might on him rowl.
By their rebounds, casts up a space immense,
Where every stroke does death to him dispense;
Fearing the thread, on which his life depends,
Some rogue might cut ere fate should give commands.

Then, when two hundred ells he had below

I' th' earth been merged far as the rope would go,

And long hung up by it within the cave,

To th' earl-who now impatient was to have

His answer-he's drawn up; but, whether fear

Immoderate distracted him, or 'twere

From the swift motion as the rope might wreathe,
Or spectrums from his dread, or hell beneath,

Frighted the wretch, or the soul's citadel
Were stormed or taken by the imps of hell,
For certain 'twas he rav'd ;-this his wild eyes,
His paleness, trembling, all things verifies.
While venting something none could understand,
Enthusiastic hints ne'er to be scann'd,

}

He ceased, and died, after eight days were gone.
But th' earl informed, how far the cave went down,
Tremblingly from it hastes-not willing now,

Nor yet this way, down to the shades to go."+

But these two hundred ells are little to the calculation of the facetious poet, Charles Cotton, who gives the following account of his unsuccessful attempt to fathom this fearful pit.

"But I myself, with half the Peake surrounded,
Eight hundred, four score and four yards have sounded;

Sarissa of Pella, vide Josephus.

↑ De Mirabilibus Pecci, translated by a person of quality, 1678.-8vo.

And though of these fourscore returned back wet,
The plummet drew, and found no bottom yet;
Though when I went to make a new essay,

I could not get the lead down half the way."*

This statement of Cotton's, while it proves his anxiety to be accurate, leaves the matter in uncertainty; but the lover of wonder seizes upon the more astonishing portion of this experiment, and Dr. Charles Leigh, who wrote in 1700, says, "Elden Hole is a terrible chasme, it was plummed eight hundred fathom by the ingenious Charles Cotton, esq. but no bottom was found;"t-thus nearly doubling the first part of the essay, by converting Cotton's yards into fathoms, and omitting any mention of the fact, that on the second attempt, Cotton himself acknowledges that he "could not get the lead down half the way." It is thus that an attachment to the miraculous misleads mankind, not only in physics, but frequently in much more important concerns. Correctness in geological investigations is not to be expected from the followers of the muses, but there is something ingenuous as well as ingenious in Cotton's lines that entitle them to respect, and it is not impossible but that, by the divergency of the plummet from its perpendicular descent, as well as from the probable subsequent falling in of a portion of the rock across the cavity, his statements may have been perfectly correct. The measurement made by the person quoted by Catcott, in the Treatise on the Deluge, inserted in the second number of the Philosophical Transactions, is still more extraordinary. He declares that he let down a line, nine hundred and ninety-three yards, without meeting a bottom. It would however be more absurd to refuse, absolutely, any belief in this statement, than to suppose that changes may have taken place in the floors of these cavernous depths.

In the year 1770, Mr. John Lloyd, F. R. S. an intrepid enquirer into the secrets of nature, descended into this chasm, and published an account of his enterprise in the sixty-first volume of the Philosophical Transactions. "He was let down by two ropes about forty fathoms long: for the first twenty yards, though he descended obliquely, he could assist himself with his hands and his feet; but below this, the rock projecting in large irregular crags, he found it very difficult to pass; and on descending ten yards more, he perceived that the rope by which he was suspended, was at least six yards from the perpendicular, from hence, the breadth of the chink was about three yards, and the length about six; the sides were very irregular, and the crags were covered with moss, being besides wet and dirty; within fourteen yards of the bottom, the rock opened on the east side, and he swung till he reached the floor of the cavern, which was at the depth of sixty-two yards from the mouth of the chasm; the light, however, which came from above, was sufficient for the reading of any print. Here he found the cavern to consist of two parts; that in which he alighted, was like an oven, the other, where he first began to swing, was a vast dome, shaped like the inside of a glass-house, and a small arched passage formed a communication between them; in this passage, the stones which had

• Wonders of the Peake, 1681.

↑ Leigh's Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the Peak in Derbyshire.

Oxon. 1700.fol.

CHAP. I.

Elden Hole.

CHAP. 1.
Elden Hole.

been thrown in at the top formed a slope, extending from the wall, at the
west side of the first dome, almost to the bottom of the second cave or oven,
so that the further end of the cave was lower by twenty-five yards than
where he alighted. The diameter of this cavern he judged to be about
fifty yards; the top he could not trace with his eye, but, had reason to be-
lieve, that it extended to a prodigious height; for, when he was nearly at
the top of one of the incrusted rocks, which was an elevation of at least
twenty yards, he could then see no inclosure of the dome.

"After climbing up a few loose stones, on the south side of the second
cavern, he descended again through a small aperture into a little cave about
four yards long, and two yards high, which was lined throughout with a
kind of sparkling stalactites of a fine deep yellow colour, with some small
stalactical drops hanging from the roof. He found a noble room of about
ninety feet in height, of the same kind of incrustation, facing the first
entrance; as he proceeded to the north, he came to a large stone, that was
covered with the same substance, and under it he found a hole two yards
deep, that was uniformly lined with it. From the edge of this hole sprung
a rocky ascent, sloping like a buttress against the side of the cavern, and
consisting of vast, solid, round masses, of the same substance and colour;
he climbed up this ascent to the height of about sixty feet, and got some
fine pieces of stalactites, which hung from the craggy sides of the cavern,
that joined the projection he had ascended. He now descended with some
difficulty and danger, and soon came to another kind of incrustations, of
a different kind and colour; these being much rougher, and not tinged
with yellow, but brown. At the top of this he found a small cavern, open-
ing into the side of the vault, wherein he saw vast drops of stalactites,
hanging like icicles from every part of the roof, some of which were four
or five feet long, and as thick as a man's body. The greater part of the
walls of the large cavern was lined with incrustations of three kinds; the
first was the deep yellow stalactites, the second was a thin coating, resem-
bling a light-coloured varnish, this covered the limestone and reflected the
light of the candles with great splendour; the third was a rough effores-
cence, every shoot of which resembled a kind of rose-flower.

"He now returned through the arch, which separates the two vaults, re-ascending the slope of loose stones, which greatly lessened the magnificence of the entrance into the inner cavern. When he had again fastened the rope to his body, he gave the signal to be drawn up, which he found much more dangerous and difficult than being let down, on account of his weight drawing the rope between the fragments of the rocks, to which he adhered, and his body jarring against the sides, notwithstanding the defence he made with his hands: the rope also loosened the stones over his head, the fall of which he dreaded every moment, and if any of them had fallen, he must inevitably have perished. Being obliged to ascend with his face towards the rock on one side, he could not make any particular observations on the rocks that were behind, or on each side of him; he saw, however, under the projection of the rock where the passage first became narrow, the entrance of a cavern which seemed to penetrate a great way, but he could not get into it. A gentleman who lived near the spot, told Mr. Lloyd, after his return from this subterranean expedition, that there

was formerly, in the floor of the great cavern, near to the large heap of stones, a second shaft, which had been covered by the miners, and was said to have gone down a vast depth, and to have had water at the bottom,this was probably the direction that the plummet took which was let down by Mr. Cotton." This covering (says Mr. H. Moore) has now probably fallen in, for a large stone being thrown down the abyss, is heard for a length of time, that indicates a far greater depth than that which is mentioned by Mr. Lloyd; we see it bounding from rock to rock, and breaking into many pieces: by listening attentively, we hear those pieces strike the sides, with fainter and fainter sounds, until they gradually die away; so that we perceive no conclusion that can enable us to say-it has reached the bottom.

The writer in the Beauties of England and Wales states, that the depth was, ascertained, in his presence, by a plumbing line, to be sixty-seven yards and one foot. This was corroborated by the assertions of three miners, who descended into this cavern in 1767. The occasion of their undertaking (according to the Rev. D. P. Davies) was the "discovery of two horses of a gentleman and lady without their riders, near the abyss. The country people imagined (and perhaps with reason) that the latter had been robbed, murdered, and thrown into Elden Hole; and let down some miners into it, in order to search for the bodies, but nothing was discovered to justify the report of the murder. About the year 1800, a similar circumstance of a man's horse, without its master, being discovered near Elden Hole, induced a body of miners to undertake a like expedition, but with as little success as their predecessors, and without making any additional discoveries. It is said, that some years ago, a cruel wretch confessed at the gallows, that he had robbed a traveller, and afterwards thrown him into this cavern.”*

Amongst the miners of the Peak, an opinion had long prevailed that all the high ground between Perry-foot and Castleton would be found to abound with clefts and caverns; and Pilkington remarks,† that this opinion was verified by the discovery of a long series of cavernous chambers between Elden Hole and the Peak Cavern. These subterraneous cavities branch off, probably, in various directions from a main passage; and with these is undoubtedly connected the suite of beautiful caves at Bradwell, called the Bagshaw or Crystalized Caverns, which were first explored about the commencement of the present century.

There is nothing about the entrance of these brilliant cavities indicative of the wonders below. A hundred and twenty-six perpendicular and irregular steps conduct the visitor to a natural rotunda, with a small opening in the roof, through which the miners first descended by means of a chain. The passage thence is low and difficult, but the fatigue is amply repaid by the grottoes, abundant in crystalizations, which open along the path. At the termination of a sloping and rugged declivity, a cavern called the Grotto of Paradise, presents itself. It is about twelve feet high, and twenty feet long, and the arches of the roof are pointed like those of a gothic hall. From those arches, a countless number of stalactites are pendant, and the

New Historical and Descriptive View of Derbyshire, by Rev. D. P. Davies.
Pilkington's present state of Derbyshire, Vol. I. page 72.

CHAp. 1.

Elden Hole.

Bagshaw, or

Crystalized
Caverns.

Caverns.

CHAP 1. sides are richly incrusted. When lights are placed among these crystalizaBagshaw, or tions, the illumination is brilliant in the extreme. The floor is chequered Crystalized with black and white spar, and has altogether the appearance of a work of consummate art." Still continuing a similar road," says Mr. Hutchinson, in his Tour,*" and entertained at various times with the curiosities of the place, and the gentle patterings of the water, which scarcely break the solemn silence of the scene, at length you arrive at the Grotto of Calypso, and the extremity of the cavern, about 2000 feet from the first entrance. In order to see this to advantage, it is necessary to rise into a recess, about two yards high. There, indeed, from the beautiful appearances of the different crystalizations, some of them of an azure cast, and from the echoes reverberating from side to side, you fancy yourself to be arrived at the secluded retreat of some fabled deity. The water also running near this cavern, brings a cool refreshing air, which from the exertion used, and the closeness of the place, is very acceptable. The size of this grotto is something similar to that of the last, and, indeed, it is difficult to determine, which is the most interesting.”—There are other grottoes, more or less elegant and spacious, connected with these, which have received names expressive of their peculiar characteristic appearances, as the Constellation, the Hall of State, &c. In all these, there are varieties of form, size, and colour, in the stalactites, worthy the attention of the mineralogist. "It appears certain that the small or tubular has no additional circumference, for the water, from which they are formed, does not act on their superficies, but descends from the roof through their very fine tubes, and hence they increase in length only. It also appears equally clear from these tubes, into which the air cannot penetrate, that, notwithstanding the crystalizing quality of the waters, yet in the exclusion of the air it can have no operation."-This series of elegant grottoes is the property of Sir William Bagshaw, whose lady was among the first of those who ventured to explore them, and who, on that occasion, bestowed upon them the names by which they are distinguished.

Caverns at
Matlock.

Were it possible to describe the interior characters of all the cavernous chambers, formed either by the disruptions or by the shrinking of the fourth limestone stratum, the detail would become tedious, and add little to the knowledge obtained by an examination of those already mentioned. The great rent in the strata of Derbyshire, hereafter to be described, by which so much of the subterranean geography of the county is rendered apparent, first distinctly manifests itself in the neighbourhood of Matlock, and there some caverns have been discovered within the last thirty or forty years, and opened for the inspection of the curious, which must not be passed over without notice. We borrow the following neat and succinct account from the comprehensive guide-book of the Rev. R. Ward,§ who, speaking of these attractions of that admirable place, says, "these consist of three caverns, the Rutland, the Cumberland, and the Fluor,|| which

Hutchinson's High Peak.

+ Bradwell's Description.
Farey, Vol. I. page 292.

§ Matlock, Buxton, and Castleton Guide, &c. by Rev. R. Ward, page 37.

The Devonshire cavern, and another of similar description with the rest, have been added to the curiosities of Matlock.