We chuckled over our guide's description of Queen Victoria's
visit in the last century. At that time the inner caverns
were only accessible after lying on one's back in a
flat-bottomed boat and being propelled through a narrow
tunnel. It was not thought proper to subject the Queen to
this indignity (She would not have been amused, for certain)
and an alternative tunnel was blasted for her. It was this
route we used.
For me, at any rate, the most tantalising thing was
that the guide turned us back at the last electric light,
saying that there were 21/2 miles more of passages to our
left, and that to our right there were caverns of an
incredible vastness, and further passages were being
discovered by cave explorers every new season. But our
twenty new pence took us only to the last electric light
and back.
After Peak Cavern, we went on to the blue john mines
higher up the slopes, In a gully below the Blue John Cavern
hammers were soon busy on the very hard rock where veins of
the blue-purple crystals were exposed,
The final site for the day was Windy Knoll, above the
Blue John Cavern, to see the messy natural bitumen called
elaterite, which is believed to give blue john its colour,
Monday was more promising, weatherwise, We parked the
cars on the edge of Stanton Moor, and walked across to a
disused quarry in the Millstone Grit where we saw
partially completed millstones which had been abandoned when
the quarry closed, (See illustration on page 17). On then
to the standing column of rock that is the Tor, from which
we had a wonderful view of the Derwent Valley,
Cromford was our next call, for a little industrial
archaeology, It was here that Arkwright built his first
rather forbidding-looking mills.
After lunch, on to the coal measures at Eastwood,
Here, in an opencast coal mine we found some of the (to me)
best fossils of the trip. In the flaky stone above and
Page 24