Cox's Cave is in
Cheddar Gorge
Cheddar Gorge is a limestone gorge in the Mendip Hills, near the village of Cheddar, Somerset, England. The gorge is the site of the Cheddar show caves, where Britain's oldest complete human skeleton, Cheddar Man, estimated to be 9,000 years ...
on the
Mendip Hills
The Mendip Hills (commonly called the Mendips) is a range of limestone hills to the south of Bristol and Bath, Somerset, Bath in Somerset, England. Running from Weston-super-Mare and the Bristol Channel in the west to the River Frome, Somerset ...
, in
Somerset
Somerset ( , ), Archaism, archaically Somersetshire ( , , ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by the Bristol Channel, Gloucestershire, and Bristol to the north, Wiltshire to the east ...
, England. It is open to the public as a
show cave
A show cave—also called tourist cave, public cave, and, in the United States, commercial cave—is a cave which has been made accessible to the public for guided visits.
Definition
A show cave is a cave that has been made accessible to ...
.
The cave is named after
mill owner George Cox who discovered it in 1837, while quarrying limestone for a new building.
Cox immediately opened it as a show cave the following year and ran it as a private enterprise until the landowner,
Thomas Thynne, 5th Marquess of Bath, took it over at the beginning of the 20th century. It was connected by a tunnel to the adjacent artificial Pavey's Cave in 1987.
The cave consists of seven small grottoes, joined by low archways. One section of the cave is known as the Home of the Rainbow, where traces of minerals have been brought in from the surface, and have given the stalagmites a wide range of colour, from nearly black, green, and orange to pure white. The famous French
speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel
Édouard-Alfred Martel (1 July 1859, Pontoise, Val-d'Oise – 3 June 1938, Montbrison (Loire), Montbrison), the 'father of modern speleology', was a world pioneer of cave exploration, study, and documentation. Martel explored thousands of caves ...
visited this cave and declared that "out of 600 caves, Cox's was admired the most".
See also
*
Caves of the Mendip Hills
References
External links
Show Caves Official website*
{{coord, 51.2817, N, 2.7688, W, region:GB_type:landmark, format=dms, display=title
Caves of the Mendip Hills
Show caves in the United Kingdom
Limestone caves
Cheddar, Somerset