ENGLAND'S CAVES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23333, 29 April 1939, Page 9 (Supplement)

ENGLAND'S CAVES

■pHE days of the cave-dweller are returning in England. News that quarry workings between Godstone and Caterham, Surrey, may be used in an Air Raid Precaution scheme suggests that English caves, no longer a mere preserve for hermit and smuggler, will again do the State some service. There are, unfortunately, few caves in or near London. Those that exist are remarkable. A representative of the London Observer, who explored two systems at Godstone and in the

Use As Air R

Kentish chalk at Chislehurst, saw that a cave-man's life need not be unhappy. Both systems are. artificial. The Chislehurst caves, with their Druid" altar and. fossilised fish-lizards, are the oldest and most extensive. One goes, though, to Chislehurst for a quiet afternoon and a conducted tour; the place has a slight museum flavour. Godstone workings are rougher, less interesting ' archaeologically, and more like the schoolboy's idea of a good cave. 1 It is well over two thousand years—--400 B.C. is a suggested date—since the Chislehurst caverns were hollowed from the chalk and Early British workers descended by grass rope through their tiny dene-holes. They mined chalk there; they built an extraordinary system of passages and galleries, a maze as elaborate as and you can find still the altar-slab used, it is said, by the Druids, and the well driven down to a depth of 72ft. from a gallery already 90ft: below "the surface. The well is 2000 years old; its water is There are twenty-two -5 " miles of paxsages at Chislehurst. The visitor can see perhaps a < mile of them. You pass through the garden of a hotel, take a lighted lantern from a guiae, and follow him into a passage leading straight into the heart of the Kentish chalk. Before Caesar At first, in the high caverns, jou find the chalk discoloured. There dark smears on walls and roof.. Explosives were stored here during war, and., fumes stained the chalk. But. as on, bending low to pass down narrow passages, you find the chalk glistening and sparkling in the lantern-light. This was the white world of men who lived beneath the soil of-Kent centuries before Caesar came. The air is pure and clear. At one point in the so-called priests' chamber, there isi a temperature of 50 degrees winter and summer. The walls are strong; the builders knew their craft, and it ia said that the roof c«n never fall.