Eldon Hole: The Derbyshire Pit That England Called the Gate to Hell

There is a slot in the limestone on the south flank of Eldon Hill, in Derbyshire, that opens straight into the dark. It runs roughly thirty-four metres long by six wide, an irregular gash in the turf, fenced now with a low wall of dressed stone. If you lie at the edge and look in, the walls fall away beyond the reach of daylight. The shaft drops fifty-five metres before it opens into a chamber, and the chamber slopes for another thirty metres to a final floor at eighty-five.

For about four hundred years this was the most famous hole in England. Thomas Hobbes wrote a Latin poem calling it one of the Seven Wonders of the Peak. Charles Cotton said his hand trembled to describe it, and Daniel Defoe argued it was the only one of the Wonders that genuinely deserved the name. The Royal Society sent a man down on a rope. Before any of them put pen to paper, the locals had a name for the hill itself, recorded in writing in 1285: Elveden. The hill of the elves.

A Hill Named in 1285

The earliest written form of the name is Elveden, which surfaces in legal records in the year 1285. The standard reading, given by the Anglo-Saxonist Alaric Hall in his book Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, is Old English ælf plus dūn, “elves’ hill”. The parish leaflet at Peak Forest still records the local dialect saying “elves on t’hill”. The reading attaches the place to the ælfe, the Anglo-Saxon supernatural beings whose descendants in folklore became the fairies, the same fae lineage that produced the Changeling of European nursery panic.

The name is older than any extant written description of the hole. Whoever stood on this hillside in the early Middle Ages and chose a word for it chose a word for nonhuman residents. The hill was their hill. The pit, presumably, was their door.

It is also worth noticing what stands at the summit of Eldon Hill, three hundred and fifty metres north of the rim of the hole. There is a Bronze Age bowl barrow there, sixteen and a half metres across and a metre and a half tall, listed by Historic England as Scheduled Monument 1008063. It is the kind of mound that crowds the high places of southern Britain, raised over the dead between roughly 2350 and 700 BC. Whoever built it chose this hilltop for its dead. They almost certainly knew what was on the south slope.

We do not know what they thought about the hole, but we do know they put their dead within sight of it. Hilltops and dark places have a long history of being treated as sacred together; in the Japanese tradition the forest of Aokigahara at the foot of Mount Fuji has carried the same double weight, a place where the dead and the living go to find each other.

The Wonders of the Peak

The first writer who put Eldon Hole on the national map was Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who would later write Leviathan. Hobbes spent most of his working life in the household of the Cavendish family at Chatsworth, where he tutored two generations of Earls of Devonshire and travelled as their secretary. In 1626 he toured the high country of the Peak with the second earl, and a decade later he turned the trip into a Latin poem, De Mirabilibus Pecci, “Of the Wonders of the Peak”. The poem set the template for what tourists ought to see in the area: a list of seven sites, five natural and two man-made, that became the Seven Wonders of the Peak. Eldon Hole was the seventh. The book was first printed in 1636 and reissued in a bilingual English-and-Latin edition in 1676 with the subtitle, Commonly called The Devil’s Arse of Peak.

That subtitle is the source of a four-hundred-year confusion. The Devil’s Arse is not Eldon Hole. It is the local name for Peak Cavern, a great mouth of a cave at the foot of Castleton, three kilometres to the north. Hobbes was advertising the most famously vulgar of the Wonders to sell the book. Inside the poem itself, the seven sites are described separately, each with its own chapter. Eldon Hole gets the black-comic horror; Peak Cavern gets the gross body humour.

In 1681 Charles Cotton, the Derbyshire poet better known today as Izaak Walton’s collaborator on The Compleat Angler, published his own version, The Wonders of the Peake. Cotton’s poem is in English and more frightened than Hobbes’s. His Eldon Hole lines have stayed in print for three and a half centuries:

Cal’d Elden-Hole; but such a dreadful place, As will procure a tender Muse her grace, In the description if she chance to fail, When my hand trembles, and my cheeks turn pale.

That is the seventeenth century’s actual reaction to standing at the rim. A man who had walked the Peak District his whole life, who knew the geography in the way only a local can, wrote that his hand shook to describe the hole. The same poem reports that he himself, with half the Pike of his line “surrounded” by the wall of the shaft, sounded eight hundred and eighty-four yards of line and the lead drew on without finding bottom. Eight hundred and eighty-four yards is just over half a mile. The line still never struck.

Forty years later Daniel Defoe arrived in the Peak as part of his great national reporting trip, A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Defoe had no patience for tourist claims. He worked through the Seven Wonders one by one and dismissed almost all of them as sentimental nonsense, but about Eldon Hole he changed his tone. He treated the hole as a near-bottomless shaft and repeated Cotton’s plumb-line measurement without his usual sneering. Defoe was the most professionally sceptical reporter in early eighteenth-century English; he looked at this hole and got quiet.

The Peasant on the Rope

The most quoted story in the Eldon Hole literature is also the one Hobbes himself tells. In De Mirabilibus Pecci a Comes Leicestriae, an Earl of Leicester, hires a local peasant to be lowered into the hole on a rope so the bottom can be measured. The man is paid a small fee. He is tied at the waist with a long line and let down with a pole to fend off the falling stones. Modern paraphrases turn the story into Gothic horror, but Hobbes’s poem is more restrained and more frightening. The peasant goes down as far as the rope reaches, is hauled back up unable to speak, never recovers, and dies eight days later.

The poem says nothing about what the man saw and puts no words in his mouth. The “babbling about demons” version that crops up in Victorian and modern retellings is a later embellishment; in Hobbes the silence is the whole point. The man came up empty, and there was nothing to report from a witness who would not survive to give it.

Identifying the named earl is harder than it looks. Hobbes wrote Comes Leicestriae and let the Latin do the work. The most famous Earl of Leicester of the Tudor era was Robert Dudley, who died in 1588, and modern blogs sometimes name him as the sponsor of the descent; Hobbes does not. The poem is a memory at one remove of an event that may have happened decades earlier. What carried down the years was the rope and the silence.

There is a second descent in the local tradition that does name names. A 1659 guidebook, cited by several Derbyshire history sources but bibliographically elusive, attributes a successful descent to Henry Cavendish of Chatsworth. The local who went down was George Bradley of the village of Peak Forest. Two hundred and forty feet of rope was paid out, then a further three hundred and twenty feet was added before Bradley touched down. He came back up alive and reported that the bottom of the chamber was scattered with the bones of deer and sheep, and with what looked like the bones of human beings. If the Bradley account is accurate it is the first time anyone returned from the bottom of Eldon Hole with a description of what was actually down there.

The Goose

By the late eighteenth century the most repeated Eldon Hole story was no longer the dead peasant. It was the goose. Travellers visiting Castleton were told that local people had thrown a goose into Eldon Hole and that the bird had reappeared two miles away at the mouth of Peak Cavern, alive but stripped of its feathers. The earliest written version I can trace appears in the travel diary of Karl Philipp Moritz, a German writer and preacher who walked across England in the summer of 1782. Moritz reports the story as a local tradition: a goose dropped down the shaft, the same goose pulled out of the cavern, completely defeathered.

The geology rules it out. Eldon Hole and Peak Cavern are in the same band of Carboniferous limestone but they belong to separate cave systems and the surveyed channels do not connect. A goose dropped into Eldon Hole stays in Eldon Hole. The story still travelled because it was satisfying. It made the hole a portal that opened somewhere else, and it held out a small comic hope. The peasant came up dead, but the goose came up bald. The hole was not all death.

Later versions add the singeing. By the time the story reaches the Victorians the feathers are gone and scorched black, and the bird has come back from hell itself. Moritz’s eighteenth-century version is the more sober one, with the goose simply stripped; the fire is a nineteenth-century addition. By the Victorian period the local guides were apparently selling the story with the full theological apparatus of a flame-licked underworld attached.

The Royal Society Sends a Man Down

In June 1770 a fellow of the Royal Society named John Lloyd was taking the waters at Buxton when he decided he would settle the question. He hired ropes and an assistant, went down the hole, came back up, and measured the open shaft at “just over 180 feet”. He wrote his account up as a letter to the secretary of the Royal Society, Matthew Maty, with appended observations from another Fellow, Edward King, and the paper was published the following year in the Philosophical Transactions under the title “An Account of Elden Hole in Derbyshire, with some observations upon it” (volume 61, paper XXXI, pages 250 to 256).

That paper ended the bottomless-pit phase of the legend. Cotton’s eight hundred and eighty-four yards had been a tall tale: the open shaft was less than two hundred feet. Defoe’s perpendicular-to-the-centre had been Defoe’s affection for a story. The actual hole, as Lloyd measured it, was about the height of a tall church spire and ended in a chamber with stalactites and a rubble floor. He could see it. He drew it.

What Lloyd could not do was put the legend back the way he had found it. The reputation as the unknowable shaft to the centre of the earth had taken three centuries to build, and it survived in popular usage long after Lloyd had walked back up. By the time Karl Philipp Moritz arrived twelve years later the locals were still selling him geese.

The Floor of the Pit

The modern surveyed dimensions of Eldon Hole are unromantic and entirely consistent with Lloyd. The surface opening is thirty-three point eight metres long by six point one metres wide. The open shaft is fifty-five metres deep, give or take a metre depending on which point on the floor you measure from. At the bottom the shaft opens sideways into a much larger chamber, lined with stalactites and stalagmites, that slopes down at about forty-five degrees and bottoms out at a total depth of eighty-five point three metres. The Peak District Caving Information register classes the system as Grade III, two hundred metres of cave passage, depth eighty-five.

Year-round ice has been recorded at the bottom. The British snow-patch chronicler Iain Cameron has documented late-summer ice in the chamber on repeated visits. The shaft acts as a cold trap; warm summer air rolls off the rim and the cold pools below.

A second drop was reported in eighteenth-century accounts, said to lead from the chamber floor into running water somewhere deeper. Modern caving surveys have not found it. The most likely explanation is that the route was real and has been covered by stones thrown in by tourists. Two centuries of holiday-makers dropping rocks into the hole add up.

In 2015 a small dig led by M. Richardson and M. Wright began excavating sediment from the floor of the lower chamber. Over the next two years they recovered animal bones from horse, deer, and sheep, along with pig and ox. They also recovered the remains of at least one adult and one juvenile human. The bones have not been securely dated. The findings were summarised by the bioarchaeologist Andrew Chamberlain (Manchester) and the karst geographer John Gunn (Huddersfield) in The Derbyshire Caver in 2021.

That is the real material at the bottom of the gate to hell. No demons, no souls of the lost, only the bones of deer and sheep that fell in or were thrown in, and the bones of one adult and one child whose names we do not know and whose stories we cannot recover. George Bradley, on his way back up the rope in 1659, looked down and saw what was there. The 2015-17 dig confirmed it. The pattern of human bones in a cave that local tradition treats as an entrance to the underworld is not unique; the Maya site of Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize holds fourteen sacrificial skeletons in a cave the Maya understood as a mouth of Xibalba.

The Burial on the Hill

The Bronze Age barrow at the summit of Eldon Hill has been excavated three times. Thomas Bateman, the great Victorian antiquary of Derbyshire, opened it in 1856 and found disturbed remains of an adult and a child near the surface, along with worked antler tine, animal bones, burnt flint, and a cremation burial accompanied by a decorated food vessel. Rooke Pennington, who had taken on much of Bateman’s territory after his death, excavated again in 1869 and again in 1871, going deeper each time. He found a limestone cist containing the bones of a mature adult, a horse bone, and another food vessel. Near the centre of the mound he recovered a bone awl and a jet bead. In 1871 he opened a trench and exposed a crouched skeleton in a rock-grave protected by a stone lining, with another bone awl and animal bones placed beside it. He noted further inhumations with quartz pebbles laid alongside the bodies, and a limestone kerb that retained the mound.

This is the standard equipment of Early to Middle Bronze Age burial in the British uplands. The food vessels are of the Manby type 2. The jet bead belongs to the long northern English tradition of jet ornament that runs from Whitby down through the Peak. The crouched body in a stone cist with grave goods is the period’s most familiar funerary form.

The choice of site is what stands out. The barrow sits on the highest limestone hill in this part of the Peak, and three hundred and fifty metres south of it, on the same hillside, the ground opens into the deepest pothole in the area.

We cannot prove the Bronze Age people who built the barrow connected the two. The geology was the same in 2000 BC as it is now, however; the shaft was already there, and anyone walking the hill knew it was there. Whether the burial was placed near the hole because of the hole, or in spite of it, or with no particular thought for it at all, is a question we cannot answer. We can say that two thousand years before Hobbes wrote his poem, somebody chose this hilltop for the dead. Two thousand years before that, the hole had already been opening into the same darkness. Two thousand years after Hobbes, archaeologists and cavers are still finding bones at the bottom.

The Wall and the Door

A few decades after Lloyd’s descent the locals walled the rim. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the great age of paid English tourism, and Castleton and Buxton were squarely on the route. Visitors came up the hill to look in. The Peak Forest parish leaflet records, without primary citation, that for a period of years a wall was built around the hole with a door set into it, and the local who held the key charged admission. The story is plausible. There is no surviving wall today, only a low fence to keep sheep from falling in, but the practice fits the period and matches the local economics.

England in those years was monetising its supernatural locations. Peak Cavern, a few kilometres north, was a well-known destination from at least the seventeenth century. Speedwell Mine, sunk as a working lead mine in the 1770s, was later converted into a paid boat-tour attraction in the early nineteenth century. The Castleton caverns were running scheduled visits well before there was a railway to bring tourists in. Eldon Hole charging at the door was the same business model with a smaller staff.

The interesting part is what the visitors were paying to see. By 1771 the hole had been measured, the bottomless-pit story was finished, and Lloyd’s paper in Philosophical Transactions was a public document any literate Englishman could read. The visitors did not care. They came up the hill, paid the keeper, looked into the dark, and went home with the same goose stories Karl Philipp Moritz had collected. The science settled the geology, and the folklore went on doing what folklore does.

Position Three

The temptation, looking at a place like this, is to choose between two readings. The first is the modern dismissal: a hole in the ground, sixty metres deep, no demons and no portal, just karst geology and the credulity of seventeenth-century country people. The second is the new-age inversion: a sacred site where the veil is thin, where the Bronze Age dead were buried because the ancients understood what we have forgotten.

Both readings close the question and stop you from looking at what is actually on the hill. There is a hole on a hillside named in 1285 for the elves, with a Bronze Age burial mound on the summit and the bones of one adult and one child found at the bottom in 2015. A philosopher came here in 1626 and wrote a poem. A poet stood at the rim in the 1670s and reported that his hands shook. A man went down on a rope, came up unable to speak, and died. Another man went down in 1770 and came back with the dimensions. Locals threw geese in for the entertainment of paying tourists. The shaft holds ice in August. Archaeologists are still recovering bones from the chamber at its foot.

You can stand at the wall, if you walk up from Peak Forest on a clear day, and look down into the slot. The light does not reach the floor. The pasture rolls away around you in every direction, and the air at the rim is cooler than the air twenty steps off. You do not need a theology to feel something here, and you do not need to invent one to explain why it is there.

The hole is what it is. The hill was named for the elves seven hundred years before the food vessels in the barrow were named after Manby’s type 2. People have stood on this slope for at least four thousand years, watching their goats fall in, burying their dead within sight of it, singing songs about it, writing poems about it, paying silver to descend on a rope and pennies to look in from the wall, dropping the occasional goose down because the next person along the path needed something to talk about.

You walk back down the hill, past the burial mound on the summit. Behind you the shaft holds whatever the shaft holds. The elves have not reported in. The peasant did not say what he saw, and the goose, if there ever was a goose, did not come back to tell us. The wall is gone. The door is gone. The hole is still there, fenced now with a low course of dressed stone, in pasture grazed by black-faced sheep that step around the edge without looking down.

Sources

Primary literary and scientific accounts

• Thomas Hobbes, De Mirabilibus Pecci: Being the Wonders of the Peak in Darby-shire, commonly called The Devil’s Arse of Peak. In English and Latine. The Latin written 1626, first printed 1636; bilingual edition London 1676. Full text: Early English Books Online (TCP A43981) and archive.org.
• Charles Cotton, The Wonders of the Peake (London, 1681). Full text: archive.org.
• Daniel Defoe, A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Letter VIII, Part 2 (1724-27). Online transcription: Vision of Britain.
• John Lloyd and Edward King, “An Account of Elden Hole in Derbyshire, and of some Observations made upon it,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 61 (1771), pp. 250-265. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1771.0031.
• Karl Philipp Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 (Berlin, 1783). English translation, Travels in England in 1782: Project Gutenberg ebook 5249.
• William Camden, Britannia (1586; English edition by Philemon Holland, 1610). for the “Devil’s Arse” attribution to Peak Cavern.

Modern scholarship and survey records

• Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity, Anglo-Saxon Studies 8 (Boydell, 2007), p. 65. the standard etymology of Elveden.
• Andrew Chamberlain, “Human and animal bones from Eldon Hole,” The Derbyshire Caver (2021).
• John Gunn, “Excavations in Eldon Hole,” The Derbyshire Caver (2021).
• Iain Barker and John S. Beck, Caves of the Peak District (Derbyshire Caving Association, 2010), entry on Eldon Hole.
• Iain Cameron, late-summer ice observations at Eldon Hole, snow-patch records on Medium (multiple visits, 2018-2021).

Bronze Age archaeology

• Historic England, List Entry 1008063: Eldon Hill bowl barrow, Scheduled Monument record (NGR SK 1156 8114).
• Thomas Bateman, Ten Years’ Diggings in Celtic and Saxon Grave Hills (London, 1861). original field reports of the 1856 excavation.
• Rooke Pennington, Notes on the Barrows and Bone-Caves of Derbyshire (London, 1877). the 1869 and 1871 excavations.
• Derbyshire Historic Environment Record, MDR2232.

Images

• Hero illustration: AI-generated by the Crazy Alchemist using Gemini 3.1 Flash, Gustave Doré-inspired engraving style.
• Landscape view of Eldon Hole on Eldon Hill: Neil Theasby, “Eldon Hole, a Wonder of the Peak,” 16 May 2013, geograph.org.uk (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 2.0.
• Close view of the rim: Stephen Burton, “Eldon Hole,” 13 July 2016, geograph.org.uk (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 2.0.

Related Crazy Alchemist articles

• The Green Children of Woolpit. The medieval Suffolk story of two green children who emerged out of the earth, the inverse of the goose going down a hole.
• Actun Tunichil Muknal. The Maya cave at Belize that holds fourteen sacrificial skeletons, treated as a mouth of the underworld.
• Aokigahara Forest. The haunted forest at the foot of Mount Fuji, Japan’s parallel landscape of dead and elsewhere.
• Changeling. The long European fae lineage descending from the Anglo-Saxon ælfe who gave Eldon Hill its name.