There is a romance about cave exploring that is almost unrivalled. The conditions of the sport are so weird and exciting, so strangely different from everything we are accustomed to. To be so near to, and yet so far from, the scenes of our everyday life; to be launched on a voyage of discovery on an English river, or to be the first to gaze on some miracle of fantastic crystallisation only a few miles away from a large town--these are among the attractions of the sport, at least in its present stage. There is nothing in this country to compare with the prodigious caves of Kentucky or the terrific subterranean defiles of Adelsberg. One might as well look for the magnificence of the Alps among our English mountains. Yet the caves and gulfs of Derbyshire and Yorkshire have a grandeur of structure and diversity of character, and the Somerset caves a brilliance of crystalline deposits, that are fully as admirable and impressive.
"Where Albion's western hills slope to the sea, There is a cave, and o'er its dismal mouth, Whence come to quick, mysterious ears hoarse sounds Of giant revelry, the ivy grew And shut the old sepulchral darkness in; And by its side a well, whence ever full And ever overflowing, silent, deep, And cold as death, the waters creep Adown the broken rocks in search of day. Above it frowns a fretted, stony brow, And only from the setting sun e'er came Within that place the joyfulness of light."
Hardly anywhere else in Britain is the mind borne down with such a sense of incalculable antiquity as at Wookey Hole. Nowhere, certainly, is there anything like such a continuous record from ages inconceivably remote. To touch first of all upon periods that are historical and measurable, we have the name Wookey, which appears to be the one bestowed by the ancient Britons; for it is a recognisable corruption--especially as the people of the district sound it, "Ookey"--of the Celtic Ogo, a cavern, the same word, Ogof, as the modern Welsh still apply to several caves in the Principality. Clemens Alexandrinus, in the second century A.D., has a reference to the cavern, and there are periodical allusions in Latin and English writers from that time to the present. In the Middle Ages its fame as one of the wonders of England was great. William of Worcester has a quaint description; he says, "Its entrance is narrow, and the ymage of a man stands beside it called the Porter, of whom leave to enter the Hall of Wokey is to be obtained." What became of this janitor is now unknown, unless he be represented by the recumbent monolith still to be seen outside the portal. References to the antiquities of Wookey Hole occur in Leland's _Itinerary_ and in Camden's _Britannia_, and there is incorporated in Percy's _Reliques_ a ballad, by an eighteenth-century virtuoso, Dr. Harrington of Bath, entitled "The Witch of Wokey," recounting an old legend of the neighbourhood.