After lunch we had a very nice walk alongside the River Wharfe to a rather pretty place named Grassington, where an ancient market had been held since 1282, but was now discontinued.  We should have been pleased to stay a while here had time permitted, but we were anxious to reach Pateley Bridge, where we intended making our stay for the week-end.  We now journeyed along a hilly road with moors on each side of us as far as Greenhow Hill mines, worked by the Romans, and there our road reached its highest elevation at 1,320 feet above sea-level—­the village church as regarded situation claiming to be the highest in Yorkshire.  We had heard of a wonderful cave that we should find quite near our road, and we were on the look-out for the entrance, which we expected would be a black arch somewhere at the side of the road, but were surprised to find it was only a hole in the surface of a field.  On inquiry we heard the cave was kept locked up, and that we must apply for admission to the landlord of the inn some distance farther along the road.  We found the landlord busy, as it was Saturday afternoon; but when we told him we were walking from John o’ Groat’s to Land’s End and wanted to see all the sights we could on our way, he consented at once to go with us and conduct us through the cave.  We had to take off our coats, and were provided with white jackets, or slops, and a lighted candle each.  We followed our guide down some steps that had been made, into what were to us unknown regions.

We went along narrow passages and through large rooms for about two hundred yards, part of the distance being under the road we had just walked over.  We had never been in a cave like this before.  The stalactites which hung from the roof of the cavern, and which at first we thought were long icicles, were formed by the rain-water as it slowly filtered through the limestone rock above, all that could not be retained by the stalactite dropping from the end of it to the floor beneath.  Here it gradually formed small pyramids, or stalagmites, which slowly rose to meet their counterparts, the stalactites, above, so that one descended while the other ascended.  How long a period elapsed before these strange things were formed our guide could not tell us, but it must have been very considerable, for the drops came down so slowly.  It was this slow dropping that made it necessary for us to wear the white jackets, and now and then a drop fell upon our headgear and on the “slops.”  Still we felt sure it would have taken hundreds of years before we should have been transformed into either stalactites or stalagmites.  In some of the places we saw they had long since met each other, and in the course of ages had formed themselves into all kinds of queer shapes.  In one room, which our guide told us was the “church,” we saw the “organ” and the “gallery,” and in another the likeness of a “bishop,” and in another place we saw an almost exact representation of the four fingers of a man’s hand suspended from the roof of the cave.  Some of the subterranean passages were so low that we could scarcely creep through them, and we wondered what would become of us if the roof had given way before we could return.  Many other images were pointed out to us, and we imagined we saw fantastic and other ghostly shapes for ourselves.