Wookey Hole Caves

The Witch's Cave

The River Axe emerges from the foot of the Mendip Hills in Somerset through a mouth of grey limestone that has been carved and dissolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Behind that mouth lies Wookey Hole -- a series of vast underground chambers, river passages, and cathedral-like caverns that have drawn human beings into their darkness since before recorded history. People have sheltered here, worshipped here, feared what lived here, and told stories about what they found. The caves are among the most significant in Britain, not only for their geology but for the extraordinary depth of their human story.

Wookey Hole sits at the southern edge of the Mendip Hills, about two miles from the city of Wells. The Mendips are a ridge of Carboniferous Limestone, laid down in warm shallow seas approximately 320 to 350 million years ago. Over geological time, slightly acidic rainwater has dissolved the limestone along joints and bedding planes, creating an extensive network of caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers. The Axe is one of several rivers that flow through the Mendip karst system, disappearing underground on the plateau and re-emerging at resurgence points along the southern escarpment. Wookey Hole is the point where the Axe returns to daylight.

The accessible caves extend for over 4,000 metres, though only the first few chambers are open to visitors. The largest of these -- Chamber One, the Great Cave -- is an enormous void roughly 25 metres high, with the river flowing through its floor. Stalactites hang from the ceiling. Stalagmites rise from the floor and the ledges. The walls are sculpted into flowing curtains and columns by millennia of mineral-laden water. The acoustic properties are remarkable: the drip and rush of water, the echo of footsteps, the deep silence of the innermost chambers.

Human Occupation: From the Hyena Den to the Iron Age

The caves at Wookey Hole and the surrounding area have yielded evidence of occupation and use stretching back tens of thousands of years. The adjacent Hyaena Den, excavated by William Boyd Dawkins in 1859 and the 1860s, produced remains of Pleistocene fauna -- hyaena, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear -- alongside flint tools that demonstrated human presence during the Palaeolithic period, perhaps 50,000 years ago or more.

But it is the Iron Age occupation of the main cave that has captured the most sustained archaeological attention. Excavations conducted by Herbert Balch in the early 20th century and later investigations by the University of Bristol revealed a remarkable picture of habitation in Chamber One during the late Iron Age and into the Romano-British period, roughly from the 3rd century BCE to the 5th century CE.

The Iron Age inhabitants made their home in the great entrance chamber, where daylight still reaches and the river provides fresh water. They built hearths, kept animals, worked metal, and disposed of refuse in the cave's recesses. The finds include pottery of the Glastonbury Ware tradition, iron tools and weapons, bronze brooches and pins, spindle whorls for textile production, and quantities of animal bone -- cattle, sheep, pig, and deer. The cave was not merely a refuge or temporary shelter; it was a dwelling place, occupied over generations.

Why live in a cave when the surrounding landscape offered perfectly viable sites for roundhouses and farmsteads? The answer may lie partly in the cave's defensive qualities -- the entrance is narrow and easily guarded -- but also in the symbolic power of the place itself. Caves occupy a liminal position in human consciousness: they are thresholds between the surface world and the underworld, between light and darkness, between the known and the unknown. To live at such a threshold may have conferred spiritual authority as much as physical security.

The Witch of Wookey

No account of Wookey Hole can avoid the Witch. She is the cave's most famous resident, and her legend has been told and retold for centuries, accumulating details and variations with each generation.

The story, in its most common form, runs as follows. An old woman lived in the caves, practicing dark arts and cursing the villagers of Wookey and the surrounding area. She blighted crops, soured milk, caused illness, and prevented young lovers from marrying. The people appealed to the Abbot of Glastonbury for help. He sent a monk -- sometimes identified as Father Bernard -- who confronted the witch in her cave. Armed with holy water and faith, the monk sprinkled the sacred water upon her, and she was turned to stone. There she stands to this day: a stalagmite formation in Chamber One that does, with the cooperation of imagination and torchlight, resemble a cloaked figure hunched beside the river.

The formation known as the Witch of Wookey is a genuine stalagmite, roughly human-sized, standing on a raised ledge in Chamber One near the river. The resemblance to a hooded or cloaked figure is suggestive enough to have sustained the legend for generations. A second formation nearby is sometimes identified as her dog or her familiar, also turned to stone by the monk's holy water.

The Excavated Skeleton

In 1912, Herbert Balch's excavations uncovered a human skeleton in the cave, buried near the spot where the Witch stalagmite stands. The skeleton was that of a woman, and radiocarbon dating later placed her in the early medieval period, roughly the 10th or 11th century. Alongside the skeleton were found a polished alabaster ball, a dagger, and the bones of a goat tethered to a stalagmite.

The combination of these finds -- a woman buried deep inside a cave, with a mysterious polished sphere and a sacrificial or companion animal -- is extraordinarily evocative. It does not prove the existence of a "witch" in any supernatural sense, but it suggests that the cave was associated with an individual who lived or practised in a way that set her apart from the surrounding community. Whether she was a healer, a hermit, a wise woman, or an outcast, her burial in the cave rather than in consecrated ground implies a status outside the norms of Christian society.

The legend of the Witch of Wookey may thus preserve a genuine folk memory of a real person -- filtered through centuries of retelling, coloured by Christian anxieties about women who lived outside social conventions, and crystallised around the suggestive stalagmite that seems to embody her.

The Cave as Underworld

Wookey Hole participates in a tradition of sacred and numinous caves that extends across Britain and Europe. Caves have been places of ritual activity since the Upper Palaeolithic -- the painted caves of France and Spain are the most famous examples, but the British Isles have their own tradition of cave use that encompasses burials, votive deposits, and ritual practices.

In the Mendip Hills alone, several caves show evidence of ritual or symbolic use. Bone deposits, human remains, and unusual artefact assemblages have been found in caves across the limestone plateau. The association of caves with the underworld, with death, with transformation, and with the supernatural is deeply rooted in human psychology and appears in virtually every culture that has access to caves.

At Wookey Hole, the convergence of the river -- itself a symbol of passage and transition -- with the cave entrance creates a particularly powerful liminal space. The River Axe flows from darkness into light at this point. To enter the cave is to reverse that flow, to walk against the current of the river and into the earth. The psychological impact of such a journey, especially by torchlight or rushlight, would have been profound. The deeper chambers grow darker, colder, and more silent. The sound of the river recedes. The ceiling lowers. The world above ceases to exist.

It is not surprising that such a place attracted legends. The Witch is only the most famous of Wookey Hole's supernatural inhabitants. Local tradition also speaks of underground passages connecting the caves to Glastonbury, of hidden treasure, of strange sounds echoing from the depths, and of the cave as an entrance to the land of the dead.

Visiting Wookey Hole

Wookey Hole has been a show cave since the early 19th century and is today operated as a commercial visitor attraction. The caves themselves remain genuinely impressive, and the guided tour takes visitors through several of the main chambers, including the Great Cave where the Witch stalagmite stands.

The caves are at a constant temperature of approximately 11 degrees Celsius year-round, making them cool in summer and relatively warm in winter. The humidity is high. The paths are paved and lit, though the atmosphere retains something of the primordial darkness that the Iron Age inhabitants would have known.

Beyond the commercial attractions, the surrounding landscape is worth exploring. The Mendip Hills offer excellent walking, and the city of Wells -- with its medieval cathedral, bishop's palace, and market square -- is a short drive away. The caves sit in a steep-sided gorge, and the walk along the river from the village to the cave mouth is pleasant and atmospheric.

Stone and Water and Story

Wookey Hole is a place where geology, archaeology, and folklore converge with unusual intensity. The limestone has been dissolving for millions of years, creating the voids that humans have occupied for tens of thousands. The river has been flowing through the darkness for longer than any human memory can reach. And the stories -- of witches and monks, of curses and holy water, of women who lived in the dark with their goats and their polished stones -- have been accumulating for centuries, layering over one another like the mineral deposits that build the stalagmites, drip by patient drip.

The Witch of Wookey is almost certainly a fiction built around a fact. Someone lived here, or died here, or was buried here. The cave preserved her bones and the objects she was buried with. The stalagmite provided a visual anchor for the story. The story provided an explanation for the stalagmite. And so the two reinforced each other across the centuries, the stone woman and the story-woman becoming indistinguishable.

This is what sacred sites do. They gather stories the way caves gather water -- slowly, persistently, shaping the stone of fact into the flowing forms of legend. Wookey Hole has been doing this for a very long time, and it shows no sign of stopping.