Royston Cave: one of Britain’s most enigmatic places
Key takeaways:
- A remote place for the Knights Templar?
- Royston Cave remains one of Britain’s most enigmatic places three centuries after it was rediscovered.
In a hole in the ground under the Hertfordshire market town of Royston, dimly lighted by flickering light, I was looking at a path of crudely carved figures, blank-faced and carrying instruments of suffering.
About Britain’s mysterious Royston Cave:
Cave supervisor Nicky Paton pointed. “There’s Saint Catherine with her breaking wheel. She was just 18 when she was martyred,” Paton chirped. “And there’s Saint Lawrence. He was burnt to extinction on a grill.”
Amid the horrible Christian backgrounds were Pagan photos: a large carving of a horse and a fertility sign known as a Sheela na gig, portraying a female with excessive sexual organs.
Another showed a person having a skull in their right hand and a candle in their left, theorised to describe an initiation ceremony – a compelling clue as to the cave’s potential purpose. Their actual, nearly childlike performance added to the carvings’ creepiness.
Guess the surprise of the people who rediscovered Royston Cave, totally by accident, in the summer of 1742.
A workman, exploring foundations for a new bench in the town’s butter need, hit a buried millstone and saw that it was hiding the door to a deep shaft in the earth.
