‘The Land to Forget Time’: tourism, caving and writing in the Derbyshire White Peak

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between three cultural practices which engage with the subterranean limestone landscapes of the Derbyshire White Peak: showcave tourism, sport caving and literary landscape writing. It suggests that modern tourism and caving perform and represent the Peak ‘underland’ in distinctive but interrelated ways which have deep roots in the tourism of the past, as a landscape which is both wonderful and ordinary, solitary and sociable, ancient and everyday, and examines some contemporary landscape writing which draws on both representational conventions. The article argues that the White Peak landscape should be understood as a ‘vertical’ geography which is both physically and culturally multilayered, and suggests that this layeredness can become flattened in geographies which focus on the surface landscape and aim to capture a unified sense of place.

Keywords:

• Vertical
• cave
• Macfarlane
• tourism
• sublime

Notes

1. Allows, rather than requires, because this elision of vertical limestone landscapes is not universal in LCA. Whilst the 1997 Mendip LCA makes little mention of famous local cave systems, this is not the case in the 2002 Yorkshire Dales LCA, which pays considerable attention to the ‘extensive underground landscape’ of the Craven Dales area (p. 77).

2. See Beck (1999a, 1999b) and Nixon (2003, 2003/2004, 2004) for the story of the detective work which led to the discovery of Titan, including the use by Nixon of information from Plumptre’s account, and the story of the subsequent dig down from Hurdlow Moor to establish direct surface access to the Titan shaft.

3. See Williams (1999) for a caver’s overview of national legislation since the creation of the National Parks. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000 was much debated by cavers (see http://british-caving.org.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=26), as it failed to specify whether new rights to ‘open air recreation’ on open access land applied to caving.