Into a Mythic Domain

A passage into the Ilkley underworld Paul Bennett from Northern Earth 87

Although tales of hidden treasure, underground worlds and other subterranean creatures don't scatter our Yorkshire towns and hills like they undoubtedly once did, such lore is fortunately preserved in a number of places.

Ilkley Moor, however - my second home - is not one of them. This is peculiar inasmuch as the prodigious number of ancient sites here almost demands it of the place. But despite the tales of faerie, black dogs, hermits and strange lights, there are no tunnels, dragons, treasure or anything of the sort. Hmmm... So how do we account for this...?

It was a warm Sunday morning and the regular schedule for two thirteen year-old boys to hike onto their beloved hills was beckoning...

Neither Jon or I gave a damn where we ended up this day. The sky was scattered by cumulus forms floating carelessly through an otherwise fine sky. We had sat a short while by the Horncliffe Well, drinking of its fresh cold waters and munching our ritual break as we had done here every weekend for the last four years. As usual, we had no real plan of where we were going; we would let our noses lead the way. So, probosci sniffing outwards, we wandered forth until, after a short while, we hit a forest of bracken, stretching its midge-ridden fronds out for acres before us. Eventually, after kicking and falling our way through it all, we came across a morass of boulders with a decidedly inquisitive form. It looked intriguing and - as usual - I decided to scour the area for any unrecorded cup-and-ring stones but, after thirty minutes or so, sat down without success.

"D' y' wanna drink?" Jon asked, sitting his arse on what appeared to be a straight line of stones.

"Yeah, ta!" I said. And we stopped for a while.

After perhaps fifteen minutes talking, sipping and scoffing we decided to continue our wandering way, westward. Picking the rucksack onto my back, Jon went to stand up but his feet gave way on the rock at his heels and a slab of stone fell away, taking the surrounding debris of earth, moss and roots with it.

"Oh shit!" he exclaimed. [Like you do!]

Turning round, Jon was pulling himself to his feet, but more intriguing was the point beneath him where his feet had been resting. Behind the stone which he had dislodged there appeared to be an artificially constructed entrance into the side of the hill. But this was strange - for the entrance was very small indeed. Gazing down the tunnel it went straight on, before an obstruction, or turn, blocked us seeing what might lay further on. There was no plant growth inside. No animal tracks of any form. No flints. No rock art. Nothing but a tiny artificial tunnel. The flat rock which had covered the entrance for however many centuries had sealed the place. Jon, as it turned out, had broken the seal.

It didn't take long before our evocative imaginations, littered with articles on Cottingley Fairies, Black Dogs and the works of Katherine Briggs, was startled into life. Invocations of Agharti and the Middle Kingdom spun round my head. What stood before our respective senses - and to this day still remains - was an artificial opening into the ground. The best and most apt description one can give it is simply 'the entrance to a miniature mineshaft'. Twenty-two inches across and fifteen inches high, this miniature entrance could be walked into - were we lucky enough to be tiny folk. It was artificially constructed out of relatively small stones - some shaped into walling, others just piled as cover stones. But artificial it was!

In objective retrospect this find remains one of the most peculiar on the entire moors - as do some of the trivial events surrounding its initial discovery.

After we had stopped raving and revering over who-what-why this thing was, we placed the flat rock slab back against the entrance just in case anyone else came across it and pulled it to pieces to get at whatever lay at the end. We meant to revisit the place the following Sunday - which we did.

The flat rock which had sealed the entrance and which we had repositioned the previous week wasn't where it should have been, but lay face down below the slope about ten yards away. We assumed somebody must have been back here, found the place, and thrown the rock down. There was no evidence of anyone having been here, but we could assume little else... Unless the little people really lived here. We both laughed and dreamed at the thought of it!

We spent a short while here again and before leaving placed the entrance stone back where it belonged.

We visited it again the following week. The stone was at the bottom of the slope again - and we laughed it off again.

By now we had mentioned this fascinating site to a few friends. They all thought we were 'off it' - but this place had to be seen to be believed. The next person was a bright mathematician called Andy. We visited the place one weekend and repositioned the entrance stone once more, just an hour before nightfall. We decided to come back here the following morning and take some photographs.

By now the surrounding bracken was so tall that it was difficult to find the place. Even though we'd visited it several times, we still had to search beneath considerable undergrowth for as long as fifteen minutes before we could locate it.

The following morning we met in Shipley. Within an hour we were at Horncliffe stone circle, close by the well of the same name, taking our regular break. We reached the 'mineshaft' by about 8.45am. The entrance stone had been thrown to the bottom of the slope - again!

After a few more weeks I enticed my eight-year-old brother to come and look at the place. He was small enough to actually crawl into the tunnel and see what lay further on - if anything. Armed with a torch and two people to pull him out should he get stuck, he reached the part of the tunnel where there seemed to be a blockage and managed to squeeze half his body round it, shining the torch where no-one (of us, anyway) had ever seen, but could not get his body fully around it. He related that the tunnel just straightened out again for another twenty yards before inclining to the left.

To this day the site remains an oddity. Its position remains hidden and its nature utterly elusive. Nothing quite like it is extant in the annals of Yorkshire archaeology. It is without doubt artificial, though it begs the question as to its nature due to its incredibly small size. It may relate to the legend of buried treasure (the most plausible explanation anyone has offered to date) but to excavate it for that hope alone is damnable. And for that reason its siting presently remains a secret.

More than twenty years after we first discovered it, the bracken has encroached the inner chamber of the tunnel for several yards - which it didn't when first we found it. This obviously illustrates that the tunnel had deliberately been sealed by whoever built it.

Some years after its finding - and clod knows how many visits we'd made - a dowser looked at this mini-mineshaft'. More than anything, we wanted to know just how far into the Earth this tunnel actually went; and, if the dowser's results are to be believed, it goes more than a hundred yards - though I find such a result difficult to swallow. Sure, as he went along its supposed route, his dowsing rods responded and followed the route which my young brother told us about when he was squeezing through its narrow passage - but the dowser knew nothing about that, so his results may eventually be confirmed.

The oddest thing of all about this site was the persistent movement of the entrance slab which, without fail, we would stand back in front of the entrance every time we left. And, every time we returned - be it a day later or a year later - the stone had been thrown back down the slope. It must have been a person doing this, surely... Perhaps.

The real niggly thing is that I have only once, out of more than a thousand visits to these moors, come across anybody else walking even remotely close to its whereabouts. Even then, when you know where it is, the place always takes some finding due to the abundant undergrowth and its attendant rocky terrain. To explain the covering stone being at the bottom of the slope away from its entrance means that somebody isn't just moving it away from the entrance - they're literally throwing it away. Why anyone who knows of this site should do such a thing is truly odd.

The site isn't officially recognised and, as I say, it hadn't previously been found until Jon accidentally uncovered it by standing on the entrance stone. Animals aren't to blame either.

Like the profusion of megaliths and prehistoric rock art which scatter these moorland heights, this tiny artificial entrance to a hidden underworld adds further mystery to the occult history of Ilkley Moor.

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