Beatrix Potter and Kents Cavern

One of the decorations around the Kents Cavern building was this sign:

Sign says:

“In 1893 the young Beatrix Potter was on holiday in Torquay with her parents. She had never seen a cave and begged her father to take her to Kents Hole (as it was then known) where he photographed her sitting outside. This experience may have been the inspiration for Mrs Twiggy-Winkles home, since her diary entry about the cave with it’s wooden door “flush into the bank” closely resembles the description in her famous story.”

Guide book says:

On 14 March 1982 a young woman called Beatrix Potter wrote about her visit. She and her parents were on holiday in Torquay and she described her first-ever visit to a cave.

“The caves.. were very easy to explore an only moderately damp. Papa got dirty...[and] slipped off a board into the sticky red clay”

Perhaps her experience of Torquay’s caves inspired her to write the story of Mrs Twiggy-Winkle, who also lived in a cave, a “door which went flush into the cliff”

So I did a bit more research and this is what I found on the net:

"…it is very easy to explore and only moderately damp."
The following is an edited extract from
THE JOURNAL OF BEATRIX POTTER
" I went on one singular suburban drive with mamma….past Anstey's Cove…and through a most dreary suburb named St Mary Church to Babbacombe…. I was so disgusted with my drive that I privately incited papa to going into Kent's Hole next morning by a way of a reviver."

" … I can imagine no more unlikely or unromantic situation for a cavern. It is in a suburb of Torquay, half way up a tangle bluff, with villas and gardens overhanging the top of a muddy orchard and some filthily dirty cows in the ravine below. I was pretty much exhausted when we found it, but by dint of eating cinnamon and the excitement of going into a cave, recovered."

"The dilapidated wooden door was flush into the bank. Outside an artificial plateau or spoil-bank of slate, overgrown. A donkey-cart was encamped and the donkey grazing, the owner a mild, light-haired young man was sawing planks."

"Papa inquired if there was anybody here? to which he replied with asperity 'I am', put on his coat and prepared to unlock the cavern. The donkey was apparently trustworthy, at least it was there when we came out."

"The proprietor ( I have already forgotten his name, which I regret, for he amuse me), hung a notice-board on a nail outside the door, to the effect that the Guide is at present inside the cavern, and scrubbed out certain derisive remarks which had been scratched on the portal during his last descent."

" I shall not go into details about the cave, which is well described in a pamphlet, and only remark it is very easy to explore and only moderately damp."

http://kentscavern.co.uk/visitors.html

The Drive to Babbacombe and St. Marychurch is not as dreary nowadays as it was in her day.

Wrote this just for interests sake. I am sorting through my photos.

Madeleine

Wednesday, 26 November 2008