Locked into a cave

It's strange how often one comes across a small hillside cave that has a locked grille-gate to it.
I have never quite figured out what's going on though. My first guess is that someone found the cave and thought it might be a useful storage area or temporary animal pen - especially as they are often in remoter areas - so they put in a secure gate and a lintel to hold it in place. 
One shudders to think that it might have been used as a prison/lock-up for humans. 
But I really don't know.
This one is on the road at Dale Bridge near Wetton.

Cave fit for a saint

The eminent local historian Father Michael Fisher postulates that this crop of rock might have been the very cave that once housed the seventh century Saint Chad.  Chad was, for a while, a hermit in these woods near Salt Village.

The soil must have risen quite a lot, I suppose, as you couldn't fit a cat in there now.  However, the people behind the Two Saints Way pilgrimage trail, which runs north-south across Staffordshire, also seem to like the story.

The cave is at Ordinance Survey reference SJ 953 273, just off the public footpath.

Cave garden opening

The National Garden Scheme 'open garden' events in Staffordshire enable nosey people (like me), and enthusiastic gardeners too of course, to look round private gardens.
It's all for charity, so there is a small charge.

Mostly the gardens one sees are nothing particularly out of the ordinary - though they do glow with the reflected pleasure and hard-work of their owners, and you can spend a happy thirty minutes chatting with those owners about how they created their pride & joy.

On Sunday, I went to this one at Brocton, where the property was built on the side of a sandstone rock hill.  The owners, rather cleverly, ensured that an old cave, hollowed out of the rock, was highlighted as a curious and interesting feature of the garden.
It rather bemused visitors.

Thors Cave - better out than in

There will be a mad rush into Dovedale this weekend I’m pretty sure. As well as being the bank holiday weekend, it is forecast to be warm. Hooray. At last.

So, if I were you, I wouldn’t go up to Thor’s Cave this weekend; it will be crowded, and it’s a small enough interior anyway.

Actually, it’s just a simple cave in the hillside – nothing to get worked up about anyway.  The climb up to it (on steps, nowadays) somehow makes one hope it’s going to be impressive, but it’s not. The view out from the mouth of the cave is the most interesting thing.

… apart from the fact that the film version of Bram Stoker’s fantasy-horror novel ‘The Lair of the White Worm’ – which actually is set in the Peak District – did use this very cave as a location.

Rave in these caves

There’s not a lot of information about Beech Caves. The incursions into the rock, which created caves out of an original outcrop, must have been a way of quarrying for their sandstone, but any exact history seems vague.

They do seem to have been used for storing munitions during the war, but exactly who was storing the munitions is up for debate. They are abandoned now, and signs warn they are dangerous..

Anyway, even though they are a good walk from Tittensor, the nearest town, teenagers still like to hang out there and build little camp-fires and write graffiti and scare themselves, as teenagers do.
A local band, The Machine Is Off, even decided to make a video there. They called it ‘rave in a cave’…

Link: Music video made in Beech Caves (YouTube)