Explorers Crawled Through A Rabbit Hole And Entered These Creepy Caves Shrouded In Mystery
You’re in a field somewhere in the English county of Shropshire. Struggling through some undergrowth, you come to a tree. At its roots is something that looks like an over-sized rabbit hole. You slip down the sloped, muddy entrance, and suddenly you’re in an elaborate labyrinth of passages and chambers carved from bare rock. You feel like you’ve traveled back in time to the Middle Ages.
Sounds like a slightly weird fantasy? Well, it’s not. This underground structure really does exist about 120 miles north-west of London and you do enter it via what looks like the entrance to some animal’s lair. Of course there’s a very famous rabbit hole in literature, the one that appears in Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century fantasy Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
What you’ll find down that Shropshire burrow entrance is hardly less astonishing than what Alice found in her rabbit hole. The interior, completely dry even when it’s wet outside, is skillfully carved from the local sandstone. The underground marvel is called the Caynton Caves although the website of Historic England, a government-backed agency, prefers to call it a grotto.
One man who took the trouble to track down the entrance of Caynton Caves and to explore them was photographer Michael Scott from the city of Birmingham, just 20 miles from the site. He explored the caverns in 2017 and described his experience to the BBC. He said, “I traipsed over a field to find it, but if you didn’t know it was there you would just walk right past it.”
Intriguingly, Scott continued, “Considering how long it’s been there it’s in amazing condition, it’s like an underground temple.” That’s right; the carefully carved caves reminded him of a place of worship. There’s more. The BBC report says that Historic England found evidence that somebody had been using the caves to practice “black magic rites.”
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