Back to where it all began

"Was I to believe him in earnest in his intention to penetrate to the centre of this massive globe?  

Had I been listening to the mad speculations of a lunatic, or to the scientific conclusions 

of a lofty genius?  Where did the truth stop?  Where did error begin?"  

(Axel, in Jules Verne's classic, Journey to the Centre of the Earth).

Come with me on a journey, back before time - before houses and cars, before agriculture, before spaceships and television, to the dawn of modern man, to a place where our forefathers hunted big game on the plains, where Homo sapiens lived alongside Neanderthals, and people shared their homes with bears, mammoths, and sabre-toothed cats.  It is a place little-changed over millions of years, a place we could almost ignore as we travel around, absorbed in our daily lives.  Yet, it is a place of stunning beauty, international importance, and a deep, humbling reminder of our fragile existence and our ever-changing time.  On a day when the sun and clouds played out an almighty battle in the heavens, Lizzie and I took a tour of the palaeontological, archaeological, historical and geological jewel that is Kents Cavern in Torquay.  

Our early forefathers

Kents Cavern is just about as old as it gets; there is nowhere in the UK where we could possibly step any further back in time.  This observation alone is enough to focus the mind, but what also strikes me about this cave system is its staggering beauty.  Nature has created, over vast amounts of time, a stunning showcase of its power. Stalactites cling fast to the ceilings, stalagmites grow slowly, but surely and steadily, from the floor.  Rainwater penetrates the cave, permeating the Devonian limestone with little urgency, creating the constant tap-tap of water droplets, each particle leaving its own microscopic mark on the cave's structure and appearance.  It is this rainwater that delivers minerals into the cave, and from which the cave derives its reddish-brown colouring, the result of Iron Oxide deposits.

The deepest part of the Kents Cavern system

Stalagmites in the cave

How wide-eyed must the first modern explorers to this cave have been, upon seeing the wondrous interior. Father John MacEnery's team, who conducted the cave's first excavations between 1824 and 1829, would of course have worked by candlelight, scarcely noticing the interior in all its glory.  What they did discover, however, were flint tools, found in the same contexts as the bones of extinct prehistoric animals, and a prehistoric human upper jawbone, recently dated to be over 40,000 years old, the earliest anatomically modern human fossil discovered in Northwest Europe.  MacEnery's work was unpopular and controversial in its day - he left the cave in 1830, and never published his findings.  It would be another 16 years before the caves would be explored again, when William Pengelly brought his own systematic excavation to the cave system.  Over many years, Pengelly undertook a full exploration of the cave, plotting the position of every bone, flint and artefact he discovered - a method of archaeological excavation that put him decades ahead of his time.  From his tireless efforts, our knowledge and understanding of our common origins, and the international importance of Kents Cavern, were established.  Pengelly is recorded as a true hero, both to archaeologists and Devonians (although he, of course, was Cornish.)

McEnery

Pengelly

It almost seems like a cruel trick of nature that what lies within Kents Cavern would not be open or accessible to the public, had it not been for the fantastic efforts of Victorian archaeologists, and I wonder how many unknown caves still exist in our landscape, how much is still undiscovered, even on our densely-populated island, with all the technology we now have at our disposal.  We're lucky - really lucky - to have this resource right on our doorstep, and I'm looking forward to repeat visits, whenever the urge takes me to take a trip back in time, to where it all began.