Kents Cavern

Kent’s Cavern

Well that was an interesting excursion. I arrived far too early. I knew I was too early. The first tour didn’t start till 11 and I arrived at 10. Had a drink and read the souvenir booklet I bought. A bit more excitement when I tried to use my credit card to save the last of my change. It was declined. Three times. Damn! So I used the last of my cash and then worried whether I should have. The problem was I was miles away from any bank and I had walked. I was already starting to get sore and tired, so figured there was something wrong with the machine at the cavern rather than my credit card. I knew there was plenty on the card.

The guide, Alan, was excellent and was able to answer all the questions I asked. He also had some lovely little tricks up his sleeve. Like turning out all the lights and reminding us that this was what it was like for the cavemen and then showed us what they used for lighting. They couldn’t just light fires cause the smoke would fill up the cave.

Sea shells, filled with moss, and covered in dripping from their meat. Two gave a surprisingly good light. Quite amazing really. I’m always amazed at the ingenuity of human beings.

The problem with taking photographs in the cavern was that with having a specific time for the tour, I didn’t have time to set up the shots as I would have liked. So I fuzzed quite a few of them and quite a number didn’t show the scale of the whole adventure. I would have loved to be on my own and taken lots of time with each shot. At this stage I’m only deleting the really awful ones and will see what I can do with some of the others when I have more time.

This is apparently a baby mammoth’s molar. Like children, lose their molars, apparently, so did mammoths. Imagine the size of THAT baby !! We saw a molar from full sized mammoth near the end of the tour. I’ve left the hand in to give an idea of size.

Now that’s one big tooth!!

The bit I like in my souvenir booklet is:

“Throughout that time the local climate was often very wet and layers of silt and mud were sealed in my stalagmites. Discarded and lost debris from ancient visitors became trapped and buried by this gradual filling up of the cave, which thus became a giant sandwich with tools and bones buried in the silt.” Kent’s Cavern Prehistoric Caves, Souvenir Brochure.

So that tooth became part of the sandwich and has been laying amongst the silt and mud for hundreds of thousands of years.

The first people to start to excavate the caves worked with picks, shovels and a donkey. They cut out any number of tunnels, finding fossils. The problem was that in those days, they tended to use dynamite to blast out the harder bits and so probably lost a lot.

This is what it might have looked like.

Apparently some of the places were so small, they had to pick the smallest man, cover him in goose grease and send him through to make the passage bigger. To make sure he didn’t get stuck, the would tie a rope to his leg so they could pull him back if he got stuck. Or that’s the story we were told !!

Over the years, constant dripping water would eventually form stalactites (from the top) and stalagmites from the bottom because of the deposits of calcium carbonate. Eventually, they join together and form pillars. Like this one:

I mean how kewl is THAT!!

This was the only bit that was behind glass. It has been there for hundreds of thousands of years and in another few hundred of thousand years, the stalactite and stalagmite will join and become a pillar like in the previous photo.

We even got a photo of Madeleine in amongst the cave people, snuggling up to her cave sister.

I had a lot of trouble getting down and then back up again. I was worried I would knock and break one of the models!! But there is Madeleine, in Kents Cavern, Torquay, Devon, UK.

Madeleine

Friday, 21 November 2008