Hellfire Caves

Alteration and extension

A chalk mine of supposedly ancient origin is believed to have existed above West Wycombe for centuries.^{[citation needed]}

During the late 1740s, to try to combat local poverty, Sir Francis Dashwood commissioned an ambitious project to supply chalk for a straight three mile (5 km) road between West Wycombe and High Wycombe (then on the busy London-Oxford road, now the A40). Local farm workers, impoverished by a succession of droughts and failed harvests, were employed here.^[3]

Hellfire Club

Members of a club founded by Sir Francis Dashwood included various politically and socially important 18th-century figures such as William Hogarth, John Wilkes, Thomas Potter and John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. Though not believed to have been a member, Benjamin Franklin was a close friend of Dashwood who visited the caves on more than one occasion. The Hellfire Club had previously used Medmenham Abbey, eight miles (13 km) from West Wycombe on the River Thames, as a meeting place, but the caves at West Wycombe were used for meetings in the 1750s and early 1760s. The club motto was Fais ce que tu voudras (Do what thou wilt), a philosophy of life associated with François Rabelais's fictional abbey at Thélème^[4][5] and later used by Aleister Crowley.

According to Horace Walpole, the members' "practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits."

While it was still operating, Sir Francis' group was not known as the Hellfire Club - this name was given much later. His club used other names, such as The Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe, Order of Knights of West Wycombe, and The Order of the Friars of St. Francis of West Wycombe.^{[citation needed]}

The gatherings of these powerful men who pantomimed rituals of the Catholic Church also featured drinking and orgies. Active in England in the 18th century were rumours of "highborn Devil-worshippers who mocked Church and religion and whom supped with Satan".^[6][7]

By the early 1760s, the club was no longer active. A local legend claims that the caves are haunted by Sukie, a young maid who was accidentally killed by people playing a practical joke on her.^[8] Others claim that the ghost of Paul Whitehead, the former steward of the Hell Fire Club, has been seen in the caves.^[9]

Legacy

During World War II, plans were made to use the caves as a large air-raid shelter if nearby towns were bombed, but Buckinghamshire's rural position meant that High Wycombe and surrounding towns were not an enemy target, and so the plans were not carried out. During the late 1940s and early 1950s the caves were renovated and turned into a local visitor attraction by the late Sir Francis Dashwood (11th Baronet).^{[citation needed]}

Hellfire Caves have had more than 2.5 million visitors since reopening in 1951.^[10] The tours take visitors along passages which extend over 0.25 miles (400 m) underground past a series of chambers small to the Banqueting Hall and then to the so-called River Styx and the Inner Temple. According to the local tourist bureau, much of the profit earned by the caves has been donated to charities including the National Trust.^[11]