Caving and hiking in Castleton

On Sunday, we went to Speedwell cave in Castleton. The entrance is through an old lead mine tunnel. After descending about a hundred stairs, we boarded a boat once used to float the ore out of the mine. Apparently, the miners found that the shaft naturally flooded whenever there was a heavy rain, so they decided to keep it flooded continually and use boats. It was a pretty surreal experience to float down a river under a couple hundred meters of limestone.

The average age of a lead miner when this mine was active was fourteen. Kids started working when they were around 4 years old and were considered old-timers if they lived to be twenty-eight. Apparently lung cancer was the leading cause of death. Kids would work fourteen hours a day, earning less than two pounds a week ($4), about the cost of a loaf of bread. There was one tunnel where an eight year old boy worked for 14 months. Another kid’s job was to work the bellows that helped circulate the air and kept people from getting radon poisoning. It seems, from my perspective, that folk would have been better off having a garden, or something, almost anything else, than mining.

The tunnel ended at a natural cavern where two underground rivers met. The cave system was originally discovered by explorers who followed the river underground from the surface. The network of riverways through the porous limestone connects to several other caves in the area. They never did find much lead here, despite the efforts of generations of miners.

Outside the cave, we followed a footpath through Winnats Pass. This is the Peak District of England, and reportedly some of the finest walking around.

The landscape is pretty amazing. The bits of limestone jutting up in Winnats Pass are much more dramatic than the rolling hills around Derby.

It is very beautiful, but also, to my mind, very cultivated. There is very little that interupts the flow of grass besides the wonderful stone walls and the occasional patch of nettles. Amidst the sheep and their ubiquitous debris, we discovered fossils. Actually, Molly had a serendipitous slide down a steep hillside and while we waited for her to catch her breath we started looking at the rocks. We found large numbers scallops, a mussel, and something snail-like that must have crawled around here during the Carboniferous.

While I do appreciate the beauty of the countryside here, I have to say that I miss the forest and the sense of wildness that comes with a forest. Even a relatively urban forest has that bit of chaos that is somehow lacking here. We did discover a few spots in the steep gullies were wildflowers and ferns grew in the seeps at the base of the limestone cliffs.