Hellfire Caves
— — a tunnel cut into the chalk, candlelit and listening.
Not only on a wall.
“The Hellfire Caves run a quarter mile into the chalk hill above West Wycombe, in the Chilterns west of London. Sir Francis Dashwood had them dug out between 1748 and 1752, partly to give work to villagers during a run of failed harvests, partly as a private meeting place for the club that would later be called the Hellfire Club. Past the flint-faced entrance, the passage drops gently through a sequence of chambers and a small underground river to an inner room about three hundred feet beneath the church on the hilltop. from the studio
Hellfire Caves, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Hellfire Caves are a network of artificial chalk tunnels beneath West Wycombe Hill in Buckinghamshire, about thirty miles west of central London. They were excavated between 1748 and 1752 at the direction of Sir Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron Le Despencer, using chalk that was then used to rebuild the road from West Wycombe to High Wycombe. The passage runs roughly a quarter of a mile from the flint-faced Gothic entrance to an inner chamber said to lie about three hundred feet below St Lawrence's Church and its golden ball on the hill above.
The caves are cut into Upper Chalk, the same soft white limestone that forms the Chiltern escarpment. The entrance is faced with knapped flint in a Gothic arch built in the 1750s, deliberately styled to read as a ruin. Inside, the chambers are named for what Dashwood and his circle imagined for them: the Banqueting Hall, the Triangle, the River Styx, and the Inner Temple. The chalk surfaces are still bare, dim, and cool, holding to around eleven degrees Celsius through the year.
The caves are privately operated and open seasonally, typically Wednesday through Sunday in summer and weekends only through winter, with a ticketed entry through the Gothic gatehouse at West Wycombe Hill. The walk in and out covers about half a mile underground on a gently sloping floor; the temperature stays around eleven degrees Celsius year-round, so a layer is sensible even in August. Above ground, the hilltop holds St Lawrence's Church with its gilded ball and the Dashwood Mausoleum, both built by the same Sir Francis in the 1760s.