The Devil's Arse

We went on a trip to the Devil's Arse last Sunday.  Or Peak Cavern, as it used to be called.  The cavern extrance is dramatic - the largest in the British Isles. 

It's strange to think that back in Ye Olde Days whole families lived here, carrying on the rope making trade in the damp shelter of the overhanging rock.  Apparently it was a very smelly place, what with the hovels, pigs, chickens and children running around, smoke from fires and tallow being boiled.  A gothy girl guide gave us a demonstration of exactly how the rope was made, and I helped her wind the wooden contraption which made it so neatly, using hempen string.

Parts of the cavern are very low, and apparently in Victorian times the entrance passage was partly flooded. So to get in visitors had to lie on their backs in a flat bottomed boat the side of a coffin, clutching a candle to their chests, and be ferried in by a wading guide.  I felt glad that the visit of Queen Victorian had persuaded them to blast a larger hole into the cavern, so that today's visitors only have to stoop along "Lumbago Walk" for a few dozen yards, and though there is mud, there are no black depths to be navigated.

 
After leaving the cavern we had a walk up Cavedale - the limestone gorge above which towers the ruined Norman castle.  It is like a scene from "Gawain and the Green Knight."