When we bought our present house in 1970, its two-acre garden was overgrown
and unloved. We couldn’t wait to start clearing, mowing, digging and
planting. Flowers, fruit trees and vegetables – all were in the ground
within weeks. Then we became aware of the awful truth. We had slugs. Wow,
did we have slugs. There were tiny slugs, giant slugs, slippery and sticky
slugs, white, black, grey, brown, yellow, mottled and orange-bordered slugs,
smooth and wrinkled slugs. We had snails too.

‘No problem,’ said the man at the garden centre. His shelves were stacked
with packets and tins, the very latest technology for killing all known
garden pests. So we scattered the pellets in handfuls and soaked the soil
with solutions. How very naive we were.

Lots of the molluscs died, but lots didn’t. Damage was reduced but by no
means eliminated. What we didn’t understand was that we had wiped out our
very best allies in the battle. We should have known that the wisdom of
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1960s polemic against the dangers of
pesticides, applied to domestic gardens as well as to the wider world.

Back in 1970 there had been hedgehogs in the garden, and frogs, toads and
song thrushes – all creatures that enjoy a diet of slugs and snails. We had
poisoned their food, but it took us years to put two and two together and
realise that the absence of our friends wasn’t just chance. Newts had taken
over the pond and devoured the frogspawn that I had imported. The old toad
in the greenhouse had long disappeared, and so had the scatter of broken
snail shells around the thrushes’ favourite stone anvils. We left huge piles
of brushwood and leaves for hedgehogs to hibernate in, but they were never
occupied while less welcome wildlife flourished.

About 1988, hoping that our friends would come back to the garden and resume
their proper duties, we decided to stop using slug bait. Instead, I
determined to seek out personally the marauding molluscs and drown them in
brine. This Herculean labour was to be achieved at night, when the fauna
were busily munching the flora and could be surprised and taken in the
brilliant light of a potholer’s cap lamp.

I soon learnt where the enemy forces were concentrated. Lupins were a
favourite, as was a red-stemmed lobelia, and they were mad about dahlias. In
the vegetable plot they liked spinach, beet and onions, especially young,
tender plants. And there was something particularly attractive about plants
that were under stress through damage, wilting or recent planting-out. Weeds
pulled up and left to die were always popular.

When the lawns were mown the scent of bruised grass tempted the enemy away
from the borders onto open ground where they were most vulnerable. By now I
had learnt to use a sharp-edged dessert spoon to scoop them up, several at a
time, without getting slimy fingers. On such nights I had record catches.

Was it doing any good? My wife still grumbled that many precious plants were
being devoured, and I could see that this was true, but I felt there was
some improvement. While the dahlias were still being decimated, the lupins
flowered beautifully. At last, there came a night when I met a fat frog on
the lawn. Then a song thrush moved in, poured out its lovely repetitive song
from the evergreen oak, and left broken snail shells on the steps.

Now, after four pesticide-free years, frogs and thrushes are back in the
garden in force. There are no toads, however, and no hedgehogs. Slugs and
snails are still common; all I can do is reduce their population in the
places and at the times that it matters. Nearby hedges and thickets are
their inaccessible breeding grounds, where, I hoped, our two- and
four-footed friends would have dealt with them. No such luck.

I found, however, on my many night-time forays that a multitude of other
timid creatures infest the garden at night. Most obvious are the big
earthworms. Moths big and small buffet my lamp glass, and there are rare
nights when heavy cockchafer beetles do the same. Frogs eye me damply, and
woolly-bear caterpillars trundle over the short grass. In the ponds, newts
hang just below the water’s edge, waiting for small creatures to fall in.
Inconspicuous green caterpillars feed on the long grass. On the paths,
woodlice swarm. They were particularly abundant in the slug-bait days, and I
suspect that they had previously been kept naturally in check by various
frogs, toads and hedgehogs.

But where are the hedgehogs now? One hedgehog, the books say, will eat 100
slugs in a night. They would be powerful allies, but I have never met Mrs
Tiggywinkle snuffling through the herbaceous borders. Recently, tired of
waiting, we phoned a hedgehog rescue centre and offered our garden as a
convalescent home. We were shocked by their reply, which may condemn me to
nocturnal slugging to the end of my days. ‘Do you have badgers?’ they
asked.

Yes, we do have badgers, but they are recent arrivals. They prowl through
the garden at night, scuff up the lawns, trample down the strawberries and
the peas, and pull ripe fruit from the lower branches of plum and pear
trees. We had looked on them as a nuisance but not a disaster. Now we know
better.

‘Oh dear,’ the rescue people said. ‘No, you can’t have our hedgehogs. The
badgers would eat them. They use their powerful claws to unroll hedgehogs
and scoop out their insides. An empty hedgehog skin, turned inside out, is a
sure sign of badger predation. The two species don’t coexist.’

We are conditioned to love Mr Badger, the strong silent hero of The Wind in
the Willows and many other stories for children. Badgers and their setts are
protected by special laws. With no enemies, they are enjoying a population
explosion; our county trust for nature conservation even pictures them in
its logo. I know that the trust doesn’t hate hedgehogs, but conservation
ought to be about maintaining the balance of nature, not cherishing one
species to the detriment of others with a less fashionable image.

Willie Stanton is a geologist and amateur naturalist.

In the late 1950s I set myself the task of surveying them all, and I
soon arrived at a curious swallet hole where four gullies meet in the shape
of a cross. It was centrally placed in a square field, surrounded by rising
slopes and cliffs on all sides. The field itself was flat, and the little
stream that entered a cave at the lowest point had cut down through deposits
of silty clay that had been laid down in horizontal layers no thicker than
a sheet of card.

Clearly the field had been the bed of a lake. But how could a lake have
existed on the top of the Mendips, which, as all the locals know, are as
full of holes as a Gruyere cheese?

My survey identified 14 more former lakes in a line stretching from
above Wookey Hole cave to beyond Cheddar Gorge. Each one is a huge dent
in the limestone plateau like a valley with no exit. Mendip farmers long
ago gave them mysterious names like Cabin Bottom, Bag Pit, Vurley and Gargill.
The biggest is 18 metres deep and covers 100 hectares.

Only one explanation was likely. The lakes probably formed in the Ice
Age when the caves beneath them were blocked with permanently frozen mud.
During each brief summer the Mendip snow cap melted and the waters flowed
away down what have since become dry valleys (cutting the gorges at Cheddar
and Ebbor) or into the lakes. When the Ice Age ended, 10 000 years ago,
the ground thawed and the lakes drained through swallet holes in their beds.

This was good academic stuff, and it helped to attract field parties
of earth science students to the Mendips. Two sites were particularly suited
to short educational visits. A road traverses the Brimble Pit lake bed,
providing a useful parking space for the obligatory minibus. The Cross Swallet
lake, with its perfect circular erosion terrace marking the old water level,
is then within walking distance.

My survey advanced only slowly because I was employed overseas. But
driving past Brimble Pit during leave in 1964 I noticed that one of the
nine deep swallet holes in the lake bed was half full of builders’ rubble.
It was rumoured that the farmer planned to fill all of them. At about the
same time a nearby quarry changed ownership and began to expand, much faster
than previously, towards Cross Swallet.

In those days the planning laws gave no protection to landscape features
unless they were officially ‘special’. Concerned for my discovery, I proposed
to the then Nature Conservancy Council that the Brimble Pit and Cross Swallet
lakes (‘closed basins’ in the science jargon) deserved special treatment
because of their accessibility and because, taken together, they exhibit
all the distinctive features of the Mendip Ice Age lakes. The NCC assessors
inspected the sites and agreed with me. In 1968 they designated the two
basins as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).

In 1970 I gave up geologising abroad and moved into a house only a mile
away from Brimble Pit. Commuting to work, I crossed the SSSI twice daily.
Every now and then, a few loads of builders’ rubble or other rubbish appeared
in the swallet holes. The NCC had no powers, apparently, to stop it.

But this was a small matter compared with the widespread destruction
of limestone scenery that was going on elsewhere in the Mendips. Farmers
were increasing the productivity of their fields by levelling the bumpy
bits: the swallet holes, limestone crags, old stone pits and mine workings
were being filled or covered with rubbish.

In 1988 I completed my survey of the limestone plateau. I had found
2245 swallet holes, 287 of which were more than three metres deep. Of these
deep ones, 34 had been completely filled and levelled and 64 were in various
stages of filling. No doubt there had been others that were lost before
my survey reached them.

I learnt the hard way that the practicalities of farming – the economics
of survival – outweighed environmental scruples when a lorry driver called
on a farmer with a plan to dump refuse on his land. My protestations that
farmers were supposed to be the guardians of our countryside were, literally,
rubbished.

‘Put your money where your mouth is,’ one farmer said, and after a while
the idea took root. I approached several landowners who were actively dumping,
and persuaded one to sell me a field with swallet holes. Weeks later she
had second thoughts and cancelled the sale. Another farmer agreed, then
backed out. A year passed with no success. Then, almost casually, I learnt
that a field was available in my own parish. It just happened to be the
field with nine swallet holes in Brimble Pit lake bed.

Three months later I was happily arranging to return my swallet holes
to their natural state as landscape features and refuges for wildlife. One
contained about 150 tonnes of soil and rocks, another 10 times that amount
of builders’ rubble, scrapped cars and household ‘durables’. The other seven
were empty apart from a few cookers and old tyres. Because the field was
an SSSI, the NCC (now English Nature) was willing to meet most of the clearance
costs from its site restoration fund in exchange for a management agreement.

The 150 tonnes were scooped out by a tracked digger in one morning and
piled in two heaps on the field. I spent many months sorting out the rocks
for wall repairs and putting the soil to various good uses. Removing the
1500 tonnes occupied a digger and two lorries for a fortnight. I had to
be sure that the exhumed rubbish went to a legal dump, not to another Mendip
swallet hole.

To recompense English Nature, I agreed that the field would be farmed
in an environmentally friendly way for at least 21 years. It will remain
as pasture or a hay meadow, with the swallet holes preserved and agrochemicals
banned. To diversify the already good flora and fauna there will be no grazing
from 1 November to the end of April; if hay is taken it will not be cut
before August. Access for educational or research purposes approved by English
Nature will not be refused.

So a chain of coincidences, beginning with a geologist’s recognition
of an ancient lake bed, has after 34 years led to that same geologist being
able to win back, safeguard and perhaps even enhance a small part of a vanishing
environment. Funny, the way things turn out.

Willie Stanton is a geologist and amateur naturalist.

We had never seen their like in other caves, but nobody could explain
their origin. I forgot about them. Until, that is, the summer of 1984. It
was a warm evening on Mendip, and I descended another sinkhole to escape
from the pestilential flies. Reclining on the short turf, I looked up at
a limestone outcrop. What were those round holes in the overhanging bit?
Memory flashed back 15 years, to the Priddy cave.

Serendipity, the gift of making discoveries by accident, is gratifying,
but it takes energy and enthusiasm to follow up a discovery. During the
next few months I examined limestone outcrops from end to end of the Mendips
and found, now that I knew where to look, several thousand of the mysterious
round holes. Family walks were delayed while I ran my fingers beneath rock
overhangs close to the ground. The finger-sized tubes with their smooth
walls and round terminations were instantly recognisable to the touch.

I found them in natural cliffs, in isolated rock outcrops, and even
in the standing stones of Stanton Drew, erected by Bronze Age Man. An excursion
to Torbay located them in hard Devonian limestone near Kent’s Cavern and
in the sea cliffs at Berry Head.

What on earth were they? They were not fossil relics of a bygone age,
because they were common, though shorter than usual, in small quarries that
were opened to build dry stone walls when the Royal Forest of Mendip was
enclosed, about 200 years ago. Also, they had inhabitants. Sometimes my
finger encountered movement, once accompanied by angry buzzing, but the
usual residents were snails. Not the garden snail, Helix aspersa, which
is too big to enter most holes, but a smaller species spirally striped in
yellow and brown, the dark-lipped banded snail (Cepaea nemoralis).

Just as a carpenter, examining holes in a block of wood, can determine
that they were made by a drill, or a chisel, a nail, a screw, a red-hot
iron or a deathwatch beetle, so a geologist, given enough evidence, can
deduce how holes in rock were formed. The round holes, typically located
beneath overhangs protected from the weather, and uniform in size range,
smoothness, shape and orientation, could not have been created by random
atmospheric weathering. They were, therefore, bored by some organism that
habitually dissolves or scrapes away the limestone in a characteristic fashion.
The creature must be small enough to enter the holes, must have a good reason
for always boring up, never down, and probably favours a damp, shady environment.

The evidence of the small quarries is critical. The creature is still
actively enlarging the holes, therefore one might reasonably expect to encounter
it sometimes in them. Which brings me back to Cepaea nemoralis.

Snails need plenty of lime for their shells, and their relatives the
marine molluscs are well known for their ability to bore holes in rock.
Consider also that you seldom find a group of holes without several resident
snails, that the holes are usually tailored to fit adult snails snugly,
that snails like to return to the same roost day after day, and that natural
selection probably favours snails that use such safe refuges, and it doesn’t
take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Cepaea nemoralis, by some instinctive
activity common to many generations over hundreds of years, excavates characteristic
round holes in limestone.

I now wrote a short account of snail holes for a scientific journal.
The editor sent it to a snail expert for refereeing. Alas! The expert, unimpressed,
commented that snails cannot bore holes in limestone. If their secretions
were acid they would dissolve their own shells. Helix aspersa wouldn’t have
had time to bore the holes because it was introduced to Britain in Roman
times. The holes were probably formed by nonbiological weathering.

Was this peer review? I thought not. With no ado I submitted the paper
to the Bristol Naturalists’ Society, whose editor, a distinguished zoologist,
accepted it with a few cautious revisions.

A year later, Israeli scientists described how snails, feeding on endolithic
lichens in the Negev Desert, gouged grooves in porous limestone. They had
filmed the snails doing it. Fired by their example I constructed, on the
domestic lawn, an artificial limestone outcrop and populated it with Cepaea
nemoralis. In three years a wide dimple, nearly a millimetre deep, has developed
in the polished flat limestone overhang.

To counter all criticism I should have set up a control outcrop, similar
to the first but without the snails, in case something totally unsuspected
is doing the boring. I didn’t do so, and now I wonder if it’s worth the
effort. After all, snail holes are not very important.

This fact struck home when I found a reference to snail holes in a geology
textbook published in 1887. Nine authors were cited and I obtained copies
of all their papers from the British Museum and elsewhere. The l9th century
had seen lively controversy among geologists and naturalists about the origin
of tubular holes that they found in overhanging limestone outcrops from
Northumbria and Wales down to Boulogne and even Sicily. Proposed origins
included random atmospheric weathering, boring by marine molluscs when sea
levels were higher, and boring by land snails of the genus Cepaea. By 1870
the land snail theory was generally accepted. Interest waned, and few modern
scientists have even heard of snail holes.

So all my research was merely repeating work that had been completed
a century before. Heigh-ho! But it was fascinating fun.

Willie Stanton is a geologist and amateur naturalist who lives in Somerset

Five years ago one of the little fields came up for acution, and we
went to view it. It was the grassy floor of a dry valley, with rocky sides
overgrown by thickets of hazel, ash, beech and oak. At the auction we were
the only serious bidders, possibly because the only access is via a muddy
track.

Our first act as owners was to ask the Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation
to inspect the field and advice us how best to look after it as a sort of
minature nature reserve. Their botanists came, indentified a wide variety
of common flowers and herbs, and tut-tutted over an invader that we had
hardly noticed. ‘Better get rid of this bracken,’ they said, ‘or it’ll take
over the whole field.’

Bracken, we discovered can be eliminated by repeated spraying with specific
herbicides. But we had opted to use no chemicals on the field. There was
an alternative, an old-fashioned recipe, which is to weaken the plant (which
spreads by a massive network of underground stems) by cutting it five or
six times a year. In time, the recipe says, the plant dies of exhaustion.

Our patch of bracken covered about 800 square metres and looked depressingly
healthy. The shoots appear in spring, starting as plump juicy stems similar
to asparagus development, a gentle tug wil detach them from their root system.
Enthusiastically we pulled them up, hundreds in an hour, and just as enthusiastically
the plant drew upon its massive reserves and sprouted hundreds more.

As the year advanced and the meadow grass grew, the brackens shoots
became harder to locate. Sometimes we came across well developed fronds
that we had missed and which were sustaining the hard-pressed root system.
But by the autumn, after about 10 forays at fortnightly intevals, the plant
was groggy. The shoots were skinny and widely spaced.

In the second year we pulled scores of shoots each fortnight, instead
of hundreds. In the third year, tens. Last year the small feeble shoots
numbered a few dozen in all. This year we have found none. The old recipe
works, but it is hard graft.

Or is it? What better way to appreciate the march of the seasons than
closely to study a flowery meadow? First come the cowslips, bluebells and
primroses, then the tall summer grasses (worth the smarting eyes and a few
sneezes) with their undergrowth of hawkbits, yellow rattle, trefoil, campion,
salad burnet, sorrel and vetch. Oh, and nettles. Late summer brings scabious,
ragwort, knapweed, wild parsnip and yet more nettles.

The bottonists had warned us not to have the hay cut before 1 August,
by which time the flowers and herbs will have dropped seed for the following
year. Although such late hay contains much dead grass and foliage it is
fragant, bulky and evidently very palatable, if you like that sort of thing.

The spin-off is just as good. All sorts of butterflies, moths and other
creatures eat grass and field herbs in their larval stage. If the field
is cut early, for silage or hay, their life cycle is never completed. In
the little field the speckled wood, orange tip and brimstone butterflies
appear in the spring, followed in the summer by a profusion of blues, browns,
skippers, coppers and heaths.

There is plenty of time to observe, identify, speculate and plan as
you prowl, eyes down, through the little field on a sunny morning, among
the grasshoppers, crikets, iridescent beetles and other brightly coloured
bugs and flies, some of which, it has to be admitted, bite. Even so, we
had much to thank the bracken for. But now the job is done, and we are reluctant
to clear all the ragwort because it hosts the black-and-gold caterpillars
of the cinnabar moth.

So, we now have another field. This one is on the Mendip plateau, with
limestone outcrops fringed with thyme, dry-stone walls demanding repair
and nine swallow holes from which we have to remove hundreds of tonnes of
dumped rubbish. There is no bracken in the new field, but we are anxiously
seeking an old-fashioned recipe for getting rid of creeping thistle.

Willie Stanton is a amateur naturalist living in Somerset.

English people like to make unflattering comparisons between the ways
that the English, and other developed nations, manage their affairs. Eighteen
months ago, a correspondent in New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ complained that National Parks
in England are scruffy compared to American ones (‘Hotfoot from the parks,’
by Colin Tudge, 29 September 1988). The inference was that our planners
should try harder. A glance at my table showed that this was unfair. In
the spacious parks of the US (PD 26), the spoiling pressures exerted by
visitors and residents are tiny in relation to those in the Lake District
or the Peak District or the other national parks in England (PD 356).

Few environmental issues can be fairly judged without taking population
density into account. A development in a crowded country affects more people,
and thus tends to be more controversial, and more costly, than a similar
project in a country with few inhabitants. The high speed rail link for
the Channel Tunnel is a case in point. The English route through Kent to
London must cut through many densely populated areas, and has met with no
end of opposition. In France (PD 102), the line to Paris will snake through
relatively sparsely populated farmland. So much for the idea that ‘the French
manage these things more intelligently’.

Some say that England is the Dirty Man of Europe. I say that even if
the label were justified, it would not necessarily be our fault. Possibly
England does have more congested roads and railways and more intensive farming,
produces more litter, pollution and acid rain, and has less wildlife, than
some middle-rank nations. Possibly. But it is certain that only the Netherlands
(PD 428) is more crowded than England. Last year I experienced an out-of-season
touring holiday in Greece (PD 76). I paid particular attention to the rivers
and beaches and came home convinced that, given that England is nearly five
times as crowded as Greece, she does a pretty good job of looking after
her aqueous environment.

At this point I need to apologise for possible inconsistency. England,
together with Scotland (PD 65), Wales (PD 134) and Northern Ireland (PD
114) make up Britain (PD 243) which is, logically, the unit to compare with
other self-governing states or with unions such as the US or the USSR (PD
13). Belgium (PD 323), Japan (PD 320) and West Germany (PD 245) are developed
countries more crowded than Britain, but I single out England because it
is more crowded than any other developed nation of its size. England is
at the sharp end, PD-wise.

Be that as it may, problems arising from the disposal of polluting waste
are most acute in the Netherlands. The Dutch need to be 5.5 times as efficient
as the Spanish (PD 78) to achieve the same environmental standard. Or do
they? A fundamental problem in the Netherlands is that the costs of disposing
of human, animal, industrial and other wastes increase not linearly but
exponentially as population grows, built-up areas expand and the countryside
(where the wastes have to end up) shrinks (see ‘Marooned in a mountain of
manure’, by Sue Armstrong, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 26 November 1988). True, there
are more people to contribute more money in taxes, but that is only a linear
increase to cope with exponentially increasing costs. I suspect that in
most population/environment issues a linear increase in population has an
exponential effect on the environment.

Not all countries are as uniformly habitable as England, of course,
so my table cannot be used without interpretation. Much of Egypt (PD 49)
is lifeless desert, but the fertile Nile valley has a population density
of 1373. Nevertheless, my table stimulates thought. Not surprisingly it
is the sparsely populated tropical countries such as Brazil (PD 16) and
Zaire (PD 15) that, relatively speaking, still have plenty of rainforest
and wildlife; by the time the population density reaches 126 (Nigeria) most
of it has gone. Is it coincidence that the Netherlands and England, respectively
the world’s first and second most densely populated football-playing nations,
are the most notorious for soccer hooliganism? Laboratory animals behave
strangely when stressed by overcrowding.

The more crowded a nation is, the less capable it is of coping when
nature behaves abnormally. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and droughts
are no problem in human terms when they strike uninhabited regions, but
in populated areas the degree to which they are disasters depends on the
population density. Bangladesh (PD 706), the world’s most crowded major
nation, suffers recurrent floods in which thousands die simply because all
the land, even the lowest-lying, is densely populated. Well-meaning people
who, in the aftermath of some catastrophe, cry ‘This must never be allowed
to happen again’ are thinking wishfully if they ignore the realities of
population density. Disasters inevitably repeat themselves in areas where,
as in Bangladesh, subsistence farmers are forced by weight of numbers to
occupy disaster-prone land.

A nation with high population density is particularly vulnerable if
it does not have the natural resources to be self-sufficient in time of
crisis. I mentioned Bangladesh, but the position of developed nations, in
particular the crowded countries of Western Europe, is just as precarious.
At a pinch, England can grow enough food itself – but only by virtue of
its mechanised and agrochemical-based agriculture, dependent on ample cheap
energy, thanks to which it takes only one man to wrest bumper harvests from
a 40 hectare farm. What price our food supply and our energy-intensive lifestyle
when oil becomes scarce and expensive? My table makes it clear that, other
things being equal, the crowded nations have least freedom of choice when
times are hard.

Willie Stanton is a geologist living in Somerset.

OUR ancestors lived in cave entrances, but it took Victorian sportsmen
to discover the excitement of exploring the subterranean depths. The first
cavers described their pastime as mountaineering reversed, and they were
also concerned with the science of caves, speleology.

In the Mendip Hills of Somerset, Herbert Balch of Wells wasthe pioneer
speleologist. In the 1890s, great unentered cave systems beckoned him with
their rushing streams, fearful chasms and splendid grottoes. It was a golden
age for cave explorers.

Neither Balch nor his early colleagues kept diaries, so when in 1969
I compiled his biography I relied on his published works and the memories
of his friends and family. The result was formal, in places speculative,
and occasionally, I now find, wrong.

I had no idea that the caving diaries of Harry Savory existed, a man
who had joined Balch’s team in 1910 when the master was still only 40.

Harry Savory was a competent caver, an artist, a superlative photographer
and a literate and readable scribe. His diaries tell of hard days digging
into new caves, of the thrill and labour of exploring, photographing and
surveying them, and of an escape in a subsiding ‘ruckle’ composed of boulders
so large that the route was not over them but through the gaps between them.
Savory also spent many days walking the Mendips, recording, with an attention
to detail worthy of Gilbert White, a landscape and way of life that is now
sadly changed.

The heroic figures of the golden age, Balch the serious speleologist
and Ernest Baker the raconteur and bon viveur, are illuminated by intimate
anecdotes. Ten-hour working trips in the cramped waterways of Eastwater
Cavern (wearing cloth cap, old suit and tie) were nothing to Balch.

Baker, the boiler-suited sportsman, was impatient with his studious
colleagues who soon recognised his gambit ‘I will go on and reconnoitre’
and pulled his leg accordingly. Baker fidgeted during the long open-shutter
exposures while the caves were lit by magnesium ribbon; in Wookey Hole he
‘would not keep still but moved about freely! so that in the plate he has
about 16 pipes’. But back at the cave entrance the indignant photographer
enjoyed ‘an excellent tea in the waning daylight with a very varied menu,
thanks to Baker’.

The conservation of caves, whose fragile calcite formations do not regenerate,
is currently the subject of anxious debate. Savory’s photographs of Swildon’s
Hole, taken between 1910 and 1925, show the profusion of underground beauty
that careless, clumsy, cynical and collector cavers have since destroyed.
The pioneer explorers well understood the disciplines of conservation. In
1911, Savory wrote: ‘This was our second meal (underground) and after it
we packed everything, rubbish included, ready for the return journey’.

Savory’s elegant drawings enhance the pages of Balch’s 1914 monograph
Wookey Hole, its Caves and Cave Dwellers. His photographs of the caves and
gorge at Cheddar were made into guidebooks and postcards and sold to the
public for decades. Savory’s photographs in Balch’s monograph and contemporary
journals are bright with a contrast that the modern printing process has
failed to match.

Most cavers drift away to other pursuits after about 4 years. Harry
Savory caved for 12 years, but already in 1913 he was noting the first swallows
arriving on 11 April, and he took a special interest in cave bats which
in his day were abundant. By 1923 he had moved into ornithology and nature
conservation, but he never lost touch with Balch and the Mendips. In his
sixties he encouraged caving by his son John, who has celebrated his father’s
centenary with this lovely book.

Willie Stanton is a geologist who researches in the Mendips.