Gothic Gardens 3 - Banwell Bone Caves, 3rd August 2008 It was a crazy thing to do: to drive over a hundred miles on a damp Summer Sunday to the edge of Weston-super-Mare to walk around a cave and some follies on a hill. But how could I resist given this old write-up from Headley & Meulenkamp's book on Follies:        The paths are now heavily overgrown with skeletal, light-starved plants whose fronds brush wetly against               your face as you slide on the greasy steps ... Low stone walls border the paths; unnatural shapes can be made         out through the bony undergrowth ... In 1824, two labourers paid by the Vicar of Banwell to find a cave which had once been discovered on the hillside broke into a completely different chamber, and found it littered with untold thousands of animal bones. The estate was owned by the new Bishop of Bath & Wells, George Law, who was intrigued. He concluded that the bones were the remains of beasts who perished in the Flood, and thus the whole site was proof of the Bible's account of world history. He saw it as his responsibility to open the cave to the public, but having done so, and having built a cottage for the accommodation of his visitors, the whole landscape began to work on his mind. It wasn't enough to prove the Flood: the Bishop conceived the idea of constructing an open-air sermon on the folly of human endeavour and the triumph of Christianity, and began building ruins, a Druid temple, and all sorts of things. This is what gives Banwell its unique, and very strange character.        Banwell is only open a few days a year, and consequently is usually busy. But you get a lot for your trouble - and entry is, at the moment, free. Our visit was damp and eventually worse, but that seemed completely appropriate.

Almost illegible, this is the last survivor of the Bishop's original 'inspiring' inscriptions. As a flavour of the whole lot, try the following: Here let the scoffer of God's holy word Behold the traces of a deluged world: Here let him learn in Banwell Cave t'adore The Lord of Heaven, then go and scoff no more.

Entry into the caves is through the arch on the left. There used to be a stone circle and trilithon on the grass - until the RAF knocked into it in the War!

The Bone Cavern, and some of the stacked bones, rather nicely candle-lit.

The Druid's Temple. The port bottle is not part of the original arrangement.

The Caves House

An arrangement of follies - a Gothick archway, below it a precipitous flight of steps, and at the bottom the way into the Stalactite Cave (cavers only please!). Here Bishop Law decided to place an inscription ordering the traveller, 'O thou, who, trembling, viewst this cavern's gloom,/Pause and reflect on thy eternal doom:/Think what the punishment of sin will be/In the abyss of endless misery' !!

The paths around the wooded hilltop lead to more follies. The Osteoichon was where the Bishop's manager, William Beard, farmer-turned-bone-enthusiast, displayed the best of the bones from the cave. There is also a Gothic Summerhouse awaiting restoration, and 'Dr Randolph's Gazebo', which may be the summerhouse built by the Vicar of Banwell, whose fault all this is, which the Bishop transferred to the hilltop on the Vicar's death. Off one ill-frequented path you can also just glimpse the footings of yet another folly.

Finally you emerge from the oppressive woods and discover the Bishop's Tower - a strangely squat, inelegant affair, but still giving wonderful views over to the Welsh mountains, that abode of dragons and monsters.

Back at the house are a Romantick cascade, a dog so huge it looks more like one of the bears that

used to wander prehistoric Somerset -  and these absolutely splendid bat biccies. I hope they're selling them when you go.

Now, this is all very well, this Christian philosophising on ruin, truth and the abiding power of God. But something else went on at Banwell too. Bishop Law was an apparently straightforward man, a bishop's son himself, a stalwart Church of England prelate who opposed Catholic Emancipation, and a reformer in a moderate way. But here, in his retreat from the pressures of diocesan life in Wells, he created a landscape that is perpetually damp and gloomy - the wood on the hilltop was planted by him, which was hardly necessary to make his point. He died in 1845 after 'a gradual decay of mind and body' which appears to have had an element of paralysing melancholy. Look at this stone, positioned along the pathway to the Tower. That's a face, isn't it? What was George Henry Law seeing in the woods by the time he finished here? Is this not just a Gothic Gardener responding to the possibilities of landscape, but actually being effected - unhinged - by it? Stark mad for ruins?