Dorking Caves
tunnels in Dorking, Surrey, England, UK
The Dorking Caves are a network of manmade tunnels excavated in the soft sandstone of the Upper Greensand deposits beneath Dorking in Surrey, England.
Location and layout
The present entrance to the caves is in South Street in the centre of Dorking.
There is evidence of a number of original entrances to the caves, including two shafts, but all with the exception of the South Street entrance have been sealed. The upper level of the caves is laid out as a wine cellar and was last used for this purpose in the 19th century. In the centre of the upper level is a set of steps leading down to a landing, from which leads a further set of steps to a lower passage. At the far end of this passage is a circular room with a bench cut out of the rock.
History
The Dorking 'caves' are tunnels, being manmade and as such not caves in the true sense of the word (a natural underground/cliff-side space large enough for a human to enter). Dorking Caves is a long-used name and the one used in all promotional and official literature.
The exact age of the caves is unknown. Historian John Aubrey mentioned them in the late 17th century, praising their qualities as wine cellars, in which capacity parts of them served until the 19th century.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dorking Caves” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.