Lancashire isn’t exactly well known for its caves, with neighbouring Yorkshire enjoying all the potholing fun, but the edge of the Limestone reefs that underlie the North Yorkshire moors, which are famous for their extensive cave systems, do show their face again one last time in Lancashire before disappearing beneath the shale and gritstone of the area.
Reef knolls
These limestone protrusions, or ‘reef knolls’, can be seen breaking through the landscape at several places in the area in a rough line between Pendle and Bowland, this is known as the ‘Tournaisian Clitheroe Limestone Formation’, and can be seen most noticeably at Worston hill at the foot of Pendle, Clitheroe, where the Castle sits upon a big lump of limestone reef that sticks up in the middle of the valley, and at Whitewell where the Fairy Hole Caves can be found.
A Thin Place
The caves at Whitewell are at one of end of an outcropping of this formation known as the ‘Bowland Line’ and are little known, even to locals, although those that do know of them mostly avoid visiting.
I was once shown them by a keeper at Whitewell estate which is how I came to learn a little about how they are meant to be inhabited by fairies or similar entities, (hence their name) who supposedly emerge on dates such as Samhain and the Solstices, when the walls between our world and theirs become thin.
One local folk story tells of how a Clitheroe woman was once abducted by the fairies and taken to the caves to act as midwife, once there she was given a special ointment to place on her eyes which enabled her to see the fairies. However when she left the caves she hid a bottle of the ointment down her stocking and stole off with it.
A few days later she was at Clitheroe Market and had happened to place some of the ointment in her eyes, whilst shopping she espied a fairy out of the corner of her eye stealing an apple, she started to speak to him but he instantly removed the spell and she was never able to see a fairy again.
The Forest of Bowland itself is what is known as a ‘Thin Place’, a locale where the boundary between the physical world we inhabit and the ‘spirit world’ that we rarely glimpse is thought to be at its thinnest, and the stretch of the Hodder valley which sits in the heart of the forest, where the Fairy holes are situated, has a particularly powerful ambience.
There are many ancient, prehistoric sites around here, a ‘Kist Vaen’ or Celtic burial chamber used to stand on the banks of the Hodder just below the caves, where the lodge for Whitewell Estate’s gamekeeper was built, this building is now the Inn at Whitewell and might explain how the Inn comes to be haunted (I used to work nights there and it does possess a somewhat eldritch atmosphere, although I wouldn’t say malevolent).
The looming hills and steep, dark valleys might have something to do with this reputation and the tales of cave-fairies and boggarts might simply have been born from long cultural memories of at least one of the caves being used as a burial site.
Other caves in the area
There are a surprising number of caves in the area which seem like they might possibly be gateways to other worlds, on the eastern side of the Hodder valley can be found several stream sinks which feed water into a small cave system known as the ‘Whitewell Resurgence’, also nearby is the ‘Hell Hole’ which reaches a depth of 38m.
On the hills to the south of Whitewell can be found Whitewell Cave, made up of up to 81m of steeply descending passages that can be explored without needing equipment, and Whitewell Pot, the entrance to which can be seen from the Whitewell to Cowark road and which, at 137 metres long, is the longest and most complex cave in the area. Several of these caves, including one of the 3 caves that make up the Fairy Holes, have been mined in the past for Zinc Oxide, also known as Calamine or Smithsonite.
Neolithic remains
Although these caves are locally famous they are little known outside of the area except to archaeologists and cavers who have carried out several explorations of these caves and nearby Whitewell pot, even then they are rarely visited, to find them you have to ask for permission from Whitewell estate and they aren’t clearly marked on maps.
Within the caves prehistoric remains, including shards of pottery, a bronze age funerary urn, the bones of Domesticated Cattle, Rabbit and Fallow Deer have been found which show that the area has been inhabited for many thousands of years.
The name of this part of the country ‘Bowland’ or ‘Boland’, broadly meaning ‘land of the bull’, tells of the long and ancient history of cattle farming in this area, demonstrated by the presence of cattle bones in the caves.
One can surmise that the mining of Zinc Oxide might have been for the purposes of making salves, like Calamine lotion, which has long been used to soothe rashes and itches caused by zoonotic (transferable between humans and animals) diseases picked up from cattle, such as Ringworm, or for treating cattle themselves, however this is just a personal theory.
Nearby at the village of Slaidburn Neolithic remains, dating from around 4,500 years BC, have been discovered and stone axe-heads have been found on the nearby fell-tops, where prehistoric people likely lived above the tree line. The area has no doubt been occupied for even longer so there is every chance older remains and undiscovered caves could be found in the future.
A B-H
Northwest Nature and History 