West Wycombe Caves

Explore The Underworld At West Wycombe Caves

Also known as Hell Fire, West Wycombe Caves provide a great visitors venue for those individuals that want to explore the county of Buckinghamshire to its absolute limit or those that are looking for something different out of their break in the county. They are thought to be ancient but nobody knows quite how long the caves have been around for. What is known though is that Sir Francis Dashwood expanded the caves at some stage during the 1740s. He actually founded the Hell Fire club and amazingly discovered the caves in his rather extensive garden by chance.

Dashwood was an eccentric and liked to stand out from the crowd, which may have been why he managed to discover and extend the West Wycombe Caves is the way that he did. He did not want his garden to blend into the crowd. Instead, he wanted to stand apart from it and thus dared to venture where nobody else in his era had gone before – underground! Given the date, Dashwood was way ahead of his time and actually pulled off a fantastic engineering feat considering the caves were all extended by hand!

The West Wycombe Caves are completely unique in the area and so provide a great attraction for people to visit. Millions have visited over the years, but they had their fair share of relative celebrities too. The West Wycombe Caves provided the venue for the Hell Fire club meetings, including Lord Sandwich and many of the other peers around at that time.

Wandering through the West Wycombe Caves will give you a rush if nothing else. You can take long paths that wind around underground until you are actually hundreds of feet below ground level. There is actually a banqueting hall down there where the club used to hold meetings and also an Inner Temple. A river runs deep in the caves and is commonly known as the River Styx, which indeed demonstrates some significance. You really can explore down here and see what life underground would be like.