The strangest place in Britain:
Baby hyenas, a subterranean toff, a thousand peculiar hieroglyphs: what HAS been going on on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border?
AS MY TORCH beam rakes the dark of the cave, it catches on symbols gouged in the rock. Some are graffiti – initials to say someone woz here – but there are also hundreds of interlocking-V shapes, and the letter M, and small squares. These hieroglyphics are witch marks, typically carved into door frames to keep evil spirits out. But here over a thousand are clawed around a black hole in the back of a cavern as if to keep some terrible malignity below at bay. Could I be staring into the hell mouth, here in England’s Midlands? Creswell Crags is an unusual place, a limestone gorge in a part of the world that doesn’t have limestone gorges. It’s as if a bit of the Derbyshire Dales tried to leave the county for Nottinghamshire and got stuck right on the border. And it comes as a complete surprise as you walk up out of Creswell village, ▶
skirt round a rock and find yourself sandwiched between tall walls of pale crag with a lake stretching away before you. A river has long flowed through here – hippos wallowed in it 120,000 years ago – but the pool was fashioned for boating by the landowner from nearby Welbeck Abbey in the 19th century. It’s one of the least eccentric things the Dukes of Portland did, but we’ll get to them later.
Footpaths circuit the water and as I set off along the southern side, I spot shadowy fissures in the creepers which curtain the cliff. Like limestone everywhere the crags are holey with caves; these are gated because what’s inside is very special. More than 80 creatures – horse, stag, bison, auroch, reindeer, bird (and maybe a vulva) – are carved into the walls and ceiling of Church Hole. This is the oldest verified cave art in Britain, and the most northerly ever found in Europe. Its discovery in 2003 was monumental; before then it was thought we simply didn’t have any. A thin layer of flowstone over some of the etchings was dated to 12,800 years ago, meaning of course the art below must be even older. It’s estimated the artists worked their magic here between 13 and 15 millennia ago, as the last ice age was nearing its end – carving into the rock, often utilising its natural texture and the sunshine slanting through the cave entrance to emphasise the detail (some of the shapes vanish in direct light), and maybe shading the lines with longvanished ochres.
A few of the shapes are still mysterious: to some the birds are more likely to be female anthropomorphs, and one or two turned out to be the work of nature, not man. The archaeologists who discovered the art – Sergio Rippell, Paul Bahn and Paul Pettitt – later found that a heavily maned horse-head ‘lacks any trace of work: it is a combination of erosion, black stains for the head, and natural burrow cast reliefs for the mane.’
It’s incredible to imagine the world those ice age artists would have known, as they put down the flint burins they used for etching and stepped outside to, maybe, come face to face with a woolly mammoth or a slavering pack of hyenas. Today the scariest creature you might encounter is a cave spider or a bat – in fact, Church Hole is closed today, and from October to March every year, to protect the roosts of nine different species.
I walk on round the misty lagoon to Robin Hood Cave on the northern side. It’s the biggest cavern here, named after the legendary local outlaw who may, or may not, have holed up here to elude a Sheriff of Nottingham keen to cut his heart out with a spoon. Rebecca Morris-Buck, Communications Manager for Creswell Crags, is giving me a tour and as she unlocks the gate, I can feel the cool of the dark air within. It carries a musty, earthy fragrance that’s a little like permanent petrichor, the smell of ground after rain.
Roll back through the ages and it would have been a waft of wood smoke. There’s evidence the cave, with its two main chambers, has been used for shelter for tens of thousands of years. Neanderthals left hand-axes and flint scrapers before dying out 40,000 years ago. 22,000 years ago nomadic homo sapiens would have spent the summer months hunting here, leaving tools and butchered animal bones behind.
It was Victorian archaeologists who really started exploring the caves, although Rebecca explains their methods were far from the painstaking care we see now: “They used to put dynamite in the floor of the cave and blow it up to see what they would find. Some of the finds might be more complete if they hadn’t done that. Researchers for the University of Sheffield now visit each summer to sift through the spoil piles from those early excavations.” Rivalry between three of the main characters – the Reverend Magens Mello, Thomas Heath and Sir William Boyd Dawkins, who was once colourfully likened to ‘a lobster with a vengeance’ – didn’t help, culminating in accusations of planting fake artefacts like the
canine of a scimitar-toothed cat in this very cave.
One discovery was particularly extraordinary though: a horse’s head carved into a piece of horse rib 12,500 years ago. It’s on display in the nearby visitor centre and Rebecca shows it to me later (see above right). The Ochre Horse is drawn with the sparse lines of those Picasso napkin sketches, capturing the neck, head, eye, and nostril in a few expressive etches. Artefacts from the crags are found in 37 different museums, but there is much to see here: the tooth of a woolly rhinoceros which became extinct in Britain 35,000 years ago, and a stone slab carved for the board game Nine Men’s Morris. Found outside Church Hole with Medieval bottles and coins, it suggests the cave might once have been a gambling den. And then there’s the skeleton of a baby hyena. “His name is Eric,” Rebecca says. “There’s lots of evidence of hyenas here: droppings, gnaw marks on a rhino bone, and a piece of lion jaw which is all the hyenas left of a kill.”
Back in Robin Hood Cave, we climb a short set of wooden steps to reach another cavern. The one with the witch marks. The one with the hole in the corner sinking blackly into the underworld. The one with the hell mouth.
The earliest are thought to have been carved in Medieval times, but the significance of the marks was only discovered in 2019. “Nobody had noticed them,” says Rebecca, “as there’s a lot of graffiti on the rocks with all kinds of things etched. But then during a tour of the caves a couple of visitors said ‘You have witch marks here, you know?’ Once you recognise the symbols they are everywhere.”
Known as apotropaic symbols – from the Greek apotrepein meaning to turn away – they invoke the Virgin Mary with a pair of overlapping Vs for Virgin of Virgins, an M for Mary, or PM for Pace Maria. There are also squares, which Rebecca explains are box mazes designed to trap evil inside. She chuckles and goes on to wonder whether the ultimate evil would be foiled by a square.
The number of marks is staggering. “The most ever found together in the UK before was 57 in Wiltshire,” says Rebecca. “We’ve got over 1000. We can tell they’re from different periods and we wonder if people returned each time something happened – a failed harvest or a disease like the plague – to make more marks to try and contain the evil.” The newest are thought to be 19th century.
We blink back out into the winter sunlight and lock the gate behind us. As we walk through the gorge, Rebecca explains this line of magnesian limestone runs right up to County Durham. In some places it is still quarried, but in others it is protected – Creswell Crags is both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Scheduled Ancient Monument. It wasn’t always this way. “This path we’re walking used to be the B6042, until they rerouted it to the north in 2007.”
I say goodbye to Rebecca and strike out west, relishing the broad blue skies after peeping into the mouth of hell. It’s a well-kept bit of countryside, the path soon lined by neat grass and an avenue of trees as I head deeper into the Welbeck estate. I’m following regular waymarks for the Robin Hood Way (he lends his name to many things in this part of the world) but a closer look at the map reveals something you don’t often see: the words Tunnel and Tunnel skylights.
They’re clues to the work of one William John CavendishScott-Bentinck (1800-1879), the 5th Duke of Portland.
Also known as the Burrowing Duke, he was an extravagantly ▶
eccentric character. On inheriting Welbeck Abbey, he stripped the house of furniture, tapestries and portraits, and lived in five rooms in the west wing which he painted pink and furnished with a single commode. One room was later found to contain hundreds of green boxes, each with one brown wig inside. He built a 22-acre walled kitchen garden and fitted it with braziers to help ripen exotic fruit, including a 1000-foot wall just for peaches. And he constructed a roller-skating rink and ordered his servants to use it.
He also became an enthusiastic recluse. Nobody was permitted to enter his quarters except for a single valet; not even the doctor. He communicated with servants by notes passed through a pair of letterboxes in the door and food, always roast chicken, was conveyed to his room by a heated truck on rails. Anyone who saw him about the estate was told not to speak to or salute him but to ‘pass him as they would a tree’, even though it would surely be hard not to look at a man sporting three frock coats and a two-foot tall stovepipe hat atop his wig. One man who did touch his cap to the duke was fired.
Then the duke opted to go underground, constructing miles of tunnels to let him get about his estate in total privacy. The map shows there’s one right next to me and I scan the tussocky grass for any sign. On closer inspection a slight dip hides a disk of concrete which later generations, having abandoned the tunnels, used to seal up the skylights. I walk on and glimpse other hints of the subterranean: a brick-lined trench among the trees as if the roof has gone from a cut-and-cover tunnel, with a gate at one end where it heads back below ground; a raised rectangle of brickwork which could be another window to the underworld; and beyond the lake the footpath traces a tunnel for over half a mile to South Lodge, with regular indentations every 10 yards showing where the skylights would once have illuminated the passage below. This particular tunnel was broad enough for a horse and carriage and the duke used it when he wished to leave the estate. With blinds drawn, he would be driven to the station, the entire carriage loaded onto a flatbed wagon, and on reaching London he would drive on to his town house – without once being seen.
The tunnels were just the tip of this subterranean complex. The duke also built a billiard room, a 250foot long library and a ballroom large enough for 2000 people, all lit by thousands of gas jets at night. A great lift descending from the ceiling could bring guests to the dance floor, but nobody was ever invited. For almost two decades he worked on his estate, spending £100,000 – over £12 million in today’s cash – every year, and employing at least 1500 people. Word is he was a decent boss (so long as you didn’t look at him) and as well as being called ‘the Mole’ he was known as ‘the worker’s friend’. Employees were provided with ‘an umbrella, a suit of clothes, a top hat, and a donkey’, the latter to help them get about the estate without getting too tired.
South Lodge marks the tunnel exit, now with two wooden gates solidly closing it off. As I wander down the lane I wonder what made the duke so reclusive. Rumours flew during his lifetime. Was it the rejection of his marriage proposal by opera soprano Adelaide Kemble, the only romance he ever had? Had he been disfigured by illness? Did he, like many rich aristocrats of his time, just like to build stuff? Or was he leading a double life? One woman said he was.
In 1896, Mrs Anna Maria Druce of Baker Street, London, applied to the Home Secretary to exhume the coffin of her husband, Thomas Charles Druce. She claimed his casket would be empty because her spouse had in fact been the 5th Duke of Portland, living a double life with her as proprietor of the Baker Street Bazaar. In 1864 he had faked his own death so he could return to Welbeck full time, where he lived until his death in 1879. I was his duchess, she argued, and my son is the ducal heir.
The story was hot gossip in the penny papers, and the duke’s reclusive life made it uniquely hard to disprove; perhaps he had enjoyed a second life as a London merchant. After more than a decade of litigation (continued by Australian descendants of Druce’s first wife after Anna was declared insane), the coffin was opened. Inside lay the body of T. C. Druce and the case was immediately dismissed, with the judge noting ‘this case is an illustration of that love of the marvellous which is so deeply ingrained in human nature’. For any walker with a love of the marvellous, there are few richer places than the Welbeck Estate.
Sadly, there is no way to see inside the tunnels now and many have fallen into disrepair. But you can see some pictures by searching for Welbeck at derelictplaces. co.uk