Hell fire caves

Today we decided to go out and visit the Hell fire caves in West Wycombe. Excavated by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1750 amazingly these caves are 1/4 mile long and were all carved by hand, in order to give the local men work to do as there had been a succession of crop failing, the chalk that was excavated was used to create a road from west Wycombe to high Wycombe.  Strangely our thoughts were if you were going to excavating chalk for a road it would have been simpler to have made a big hole and gather the chalk, but here is a series of tunnels, chambers and even a banquet hall that are intricate and designed and we wondered there must have been something else going on here.

As we entered the caves the temperature dropped immediately and there was faint damp smell from the moisture in the chalk and the walls felt very damp.  It was also very dark in places and a bit spooky.

As you can see the map of the tunnels very organised and when they were finished Sir Francis Dashwood established a Hell fire club and held meetings with secret members who were aristocrats and statesmen such as Lord Sandwich, John Wilkes as well as others, it seems these meetings were notorious and as you can see by the map there is a banquet hall in which they all met and had fun with drinking and women and it reminded me of a film and maybe it inspired the film eyes wide shut.

There was even an order with in the aristocrats with 12 being the superior part of the club meant to hark back to the 12 apostles and the rest of the members being inferior, and after there dinner the 12 who dressed in exotic robes would rise and follow the tunnels deeper into the caves, going through a triangle cut tunnel meant to represent a females private area and go over the river styx which has many stalagmites and stalactites and also had meaning to separate this world from the underworld. This finally lead to an inner temple where the men carried on getting up to mischief with the woman who had disguised themselves as nuns to gain entrance to the tunnels with out raising suspicion from the locals.

Sophie really loved the caves and she even had her little torch to light the way and really wanted to catch 1 of the 3 ghosts that was supposed to haunt the caves.  We found a couple of dubious looking characters flying by but they didn't scary Sophie and in the end she decided to do the scarring by making shrilling echoing ghost OOOoooOOooo noises to scary the other visitors

After our visits to the tunnels we decided to take a hike up the hill and were rewarded when we got to the top by a wonderful view and more famous landmarks built in the 18th century by Sir Francis Dashwood who had been on the grand tour and brought back many of his experience with him and above the tunnels is the grand  St Lawrence church with its iconic golden ball and beautiful ceilings inspired by his trips to Italy.

There was also the Dashwood Mausoleum and in the short distance we could see west Wycombe park which is boast the finest theatrical and italianate houses hosting grottoes and an ornamental lake as well as Rococo gardens, we would save the house for a visit another day, but had a look around the mausoleum.


Well it nearing the end of the day and we had a large hill to climb down so after taking a brief rest we started the descend and came across some pretty scary looking witchy trees.  All in all we had a really nice day out and Sophie really enjoyed her self running around the caves.