Re: Down The Rabbit Hole

If you mean the photos on Puddle's OP; if you look at those horizontal lines you can see that they are the same angle right across, that is, they look more like long strata faults in the original rock, (sandstone?) rather than individual joins between bricks. And looking at the other Shropshire caves which Swimfeeder linked to, those horizontal strata lines are very prominent.

But if those are bricks, they're very badly made. Most of them don't have parallel horizontal edges, which you need if you want to keep your pillars reasonably perpendicular.

I also think they've used a lot of clay. If you look at the photo that looks like someone standing with his legs apart and slightly bent, you can see where they've put wet clay on the "groin" area, to finish it.

I think the caves were already there, more or less with all the interior "spaces" occurring naturally, and then somebody came along and thought it would be a good place to hide. So they went in and started enlarging the spaces, leaving whole sections to act as supports, (the "pillars"), and maybe grinding the surfaces down with harder rocks, to make the rooms more commodious. Since natural strata lines in rocks are actually "surfaces" between layers, they would probably reappear even after the rock face had been carved flat, giving the impression of brick construction.

I don't think for a minute that they are man-made caves, built from scratch. If they were built above ground, the pillars would be uniform right to the tops, where there would be a lintel and an arch supporting a roof. To me, that suggests that they were just one of the many hillside caves in that area, as Swimmy showed, and the "renovators" simply extended then further into the hillside, and they eventually were covered in soil.

But as you rightly say, Realist, we'd have to actually go there and touch the walls and have a close look before we could be sure.

Re: Down The Rabbit Hole

Nottingham is another place with a labyrinth of caves beneath the city.

Carved out of the sandstone , and the caves in the OP also looks like sandstone to me.

This was Castle Gate medieval malt kiln.



http://www.nickcook.net/city-of-caves-tigguo-cobauc/

Interesting read and video here :

http://www.tparchaeology.co.uk/caves/caveswebsite/

Re: Down The Rabbit Hole

Ah, yes, that looks more like it. I'm convinced.

Obviously the excavators wanted to make the holes look like a construction, and carved horizontal grooves near the tops of the front "columns", to make it look like there was a lintel on top of the columns.

Those two slightly-darker columns would be later additions, I'd say?

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Re: Down The Rabbit Hole

Still seems unlikely in the OP's temple that they excavated tons of sandstone and shipped it all out through that tiny rabbit hole in, presumably little buckets !

Re: Down The Rabbit Hole

Unless that rabbit hole has been used by many many generations of rabbits, it probably wasn't even there when the cave was excavated, R.

I think I'll settle for; It was originally a hole in the wall, which was excavated, enlarged and modified, then covered over with a relatively shallow layer of soil. Probably, large gaps were left to allow air-flow. Later, bunnies dug holes in the soil and eventually broke through to the excavated interior via those gaps.

Re: Down The Rabbit Hole

I think the 'rabbit hole ' bit was put in to make it more of a story.

Wrought iron gates have apparently been placed over the entrance to the cave. So there must be more than one entrance.

I think they've always been like that , to one degree or another, and over the centuries people have carved and manicured what could have originally been erosion when the earth was covered with water, however many billions of years ago that might have been.

Now you can tell me I'm wrong. (which is probably true).