- Location: B6265, Greenhow Hill, Pateley Bridge, Harrogate HG3 5JL
- Opening times: Saturday and Sunday 9.00am – 6.00pm; Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday 10.00am – 5.00pm; Tuesday closed.
- Entry: Adult (age 14+) £16.00, concession £14.00, child (4 – 13) £11.50, family (2 adults + 2 children) £49.50
- Access: Car park on site
The plan was Skipton Castle, but that went all gang aft agley when Annie and I passed a brown sign for something called Stump Cross Caverns. Exactly what these were we knew not, but eighteen castles have featured in these pages to date with not a single cave complex in sight, so it was time to redress that balance.
Stump Cross caverns is a limestone cave system located between Wharfedale and Nidderdale, two of the Yorkshire Dales. The caverns are believed to be about half a million years old, although the process of their creation began 300 million years earlier, when what is now the Dales lay at the bottom of an ocean and the dinosaurs weren’t yet a twinkle in God’s eye.
The caverns were discovered in 1858, or possibly 1860, by brothers Mark and William Newbould, miners by trade out prospecting for lead veins. The Newboulds were originally from Derbyshire and were familiar with the four show caves around Castleton, so they immediately saw their discovery’s potential as a tourist attraction. After negotiating a lease with the landowner of Stump Cross and enlisting brother Tom as a tour guide, they opened this natural wonder to tourists, which back then would primarily be the moneyed class of Halifax and Leeds.
Over the years many speleologists would visit the site, seeking out new passages. One such explorer was Cambridge University student Christopher Long. In early 1922 he and four of his colleagues discovered nearly 450m of passageway. Long returned for some solo exploring later that year and, and in classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth style, claimed to have discovered a subterranean lake. However, when the owners of the caverns refused to give him a cut of the tourist dollar, he sealed the site and withheld it location. Long died tragically young, overdosing on chloral hydrate in September 1924, aged 23. Cavers have been looking for his legendary lake ever since.
Another Stump Cross legend is Geoff Workman who, in 1963, broke a world record there when he spent 105 days in subterranea, the longest time spent underground in total isolation. Workman was aiming for 100 days, which would have comfortably beaten the previous holder by 35 days, but lost track of time and emerged five days late. He remained a regular visitor to Stump Cross right up until his death in 2020, and, as is the way with such things, his record has since been surpassed. The current record holder Beatriz Flamini, who spent 500 days underground between November 2021 and April 2023.
Some of the rocks have distinctive shapes and have been named accordingly. The ‘Hawk’ is on the left, and the ‘Sleeping Cat’ on the right.
Destination or Diversion?
Once supplied with hard hats and torches visitors are left to tour the caverns at their leisure, which takes at least an hour. I would probably have spent more time below if I didn’t feel so uncomfortable being bent over much of the time. Whereas there were many places where I could stand upright, there were equally as many where I could not. Mother Nature wasn’t really thinking of people over six feet tall when she constructed these caverns. The visitor centre has a gift shop that is almost an attraction in itself – I must have spent half an hour admiring the fantastic selection of fossils on sale – and we stopped for a bite to eat. It made for a good afternoon out, so I’m calling Stump Cross Caverns a destination.
