Eldon Hole
| Eldon Hole | |
| Derbyshire | |
|---|---|
 Eldon Hole | |
| Location: | Peak District |
| SK11618089 | |
| Co-ordinates: | 53°19’29"N, 1°49’38"W |
| Depth: | (reputedly bottomless) |
| Geology: | Limestone |
Eldon Hole is a chasm in the earth in Eldon Hill, above Peak Forest Village. It is 100 feet long and 20 feet wide and long had a reputation for being bottomless. It has a particular fascination as a hole appearing suddenly in the midst of a green pasture, whence it plunges into the bowels of the earth.
This fearsome chasm is counted amongst the Seven Wonders of the Peak (and one of only two of the Seven Wonders which Daniel Defoe believed worthy of the name.
Charles Cotton wrote of the Eldon Hole in 1681:
A gulf wide, steep, black, and a dreadful one
Which few, that comes to see it, dare come near—Charles Cotton[1]
Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, visited the Peak in 1626, as a guest of the Earl of Devonshire, and he too wrote of the wonder of the Eldon Hole: he described how the Earl of Leicester lowered a peasant into the abyss to a depth of 750 feet, and that the man was hauled up raving, and died eight days later without saying what he had seen.
Daniel Defoe recorded that:
this opening goes directly down perpendicular into the earth, and perhaps to the centre; it may be about twenty foot over one way, and fifty or sixty the other; it has no bottom, that is to say, none that can yet be heard of. Mr. Cotton says, he let down eight hundred fathoms of line into it, and that the plummet drew still; so that, in a word, he sounded about a mile perpendicular; for as we call a mile 1760 yards, and 884 is above half, then doubtless eight hundred fathoms must be 1600 yards, which is near a mile.—Daniel Defoe's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1726
Modern geologists have ruined the wonder by measuring the depth of the hole at just 245 feet, although it is acknowledged it has been part-filled by stones over the years, and potholers can descend deeper to chasms under the hill, which may render it bottomless in a manner of speaking.
References
- ↑ The Wonders of the Peake by Charles Cotton (1630 –1687)
Outside links
| The Seven 'Wonders of the Peak' in Derbyshire |
|---|
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Chatsworth House • Devil's Arse • Ebbing and Flowing Well • Eldon Hole • Mam Tor • Poole's Cavern • St Ann's Well |