Dene Holes

 I said I would write about sites in alphabetical order so – I now need a site beginning with the letter D and why not also something old and mysterious.  So this is about ‘Dene Holes’.

When I was teaching and lecturing in East London I used to say so classes ‘who can tell me what a Dene Hole is?’ There would be a stunned silence. The only exception would be if anybody came from industrial North West Kent - Greenwich to Chatham.   You see I was brought up in Gravesend and people there know what Dene Holes are. 

Basically a dene hole is what you find if you wake up one morning and your front garden has disappeared and instead there is a great chasm going down into the earth. Everyone would say 'it’s okay; it’s only a dene hole'.  And trust me that this has happened..  We all knew about them and would say to each - they were of course where the Danes lived when they came over here to pillage and plunder and – er - live in holes.   One of them, in Swanscombe, was called ‘Clabbernapper's Hole’ and he was a particularly nasty monster.  And I’ll come back to him later.

If I’m honest Greenwich is probably a bad place to include in an article on Dene holes. There are very few in the area although they do turn up from time to time. I guess that the all the excavations between the A2 and the river for sand and chalk has removed most of them. But they do turn up occasionally.  The interest in discovering Dene Holes seems to have been at its most intense in the late 19th century and various intrepid explorers descended into them see what they could find.  The various local antiquarian societies were interested and set up expeditions to investigate and wrote what were on the whole some fairly serious reports.

For instance, there is a report from 1873, about a cave and chamber discovered in Eltham Park. The shaft was 140 ft. deep and 4 ft, wide; it had a flat floor made of flint, was supported by three pillars of chalk and lined with blocks of chalk.   Sheep and dog bones were discovered and the explorers thought pick marks on the walls were made by antlers. The author of the report did not know exactly where this hole was and speculated, in 1873, that it may or may not still be there.

More recently three dene holes in Abbey Wood which had been recorded in 1906 by the Woolwich Antiquarians opened up  in 1974.  But before it could be recorded it was filled in by park keepers.  They were in woodland on the west side of New Road, south of Woodlands Walk. In Wickham Lane a block of flats is ‘Dene Hole House’.

Much of the information gathered by explorers has been co-ordinated and further expeditions have been launched by organisations like Subterranea Britannica and Kent Underground Research Group. Various serious articles have appeared in archaeological and other publications 

These days when a sudden hole appears we tend to call it ‘a collapse’ and not take much notice. But all sorts of things have turned up in the past in our area if not to the same extent they have in some areas immediately to the south and east of us.  Many were discovered in the 1940s and 50s when new housing was built in Orpington on the hillsides above the Cray. .  There are many others in Bexley. -  most particularly in Joydens Wood on the Bexley/Kent border and in nearby Stankey Wood and Baldwyns Park (ex Pot Kiln Lane) where enormous numbers have been found all very close tougher. These have been examined and recorded in great detail   

There are also deneholes in south east Essex – a very famous group are in Hangman’s Wood just off the A1013 in Thurrock – and I am need to see that Google Maps marks the site as "Hangman’s Wood and dene holes” .

One of the leading people on the subject of Dene Holes is Rod le Gear who is coming to speak to Greenwich Industrial History Society in January on Underground Greenwich. Rod has published a great deal on the subject. I am also grateful for information in the Journals of the Chelsea Speleological Society compiled by the late Harry Pearlman when he was still working for Greenwich Planning Dept. in the 1960s.  

Nowadays there is a consensus that Dene Holes were dug as a source of chalk which was used by farmers for improving land and perhaps were also used in building.  They may have been dug by professional itinerant miners working for individual farmers and landowners. They are different from chalk mines and numerous other types of holes,  even the Danes are ruled out as having lived in them.   In the various studies of Dene Holes is a great deal of detail about their structure, size, and interiors.

Harry Pearman pointed out that  one thing all the chambers have in common is that they are dug into chalk. If it was not the chalk which was wanted then why aren’t there piles of chalk  lying in heaps around the entrances to the shafts.  Harry, writing in 1966, also said we should note some peculiarities about dene holes which could not easily be explained - for instance the existence of 60 or 70 holes in one small patch of woods, a  love of symmetry in digging the holes  the smoothing off the walls.  They are also not thought to be a source of flint although flints are found in the chalk – flint mines, like Grimes Graves in Norfolk.

Flint – and its mining - takes us back to Mr Clabbernapper..  In 1820 the Royal Engineer, George Landman who built the Greenwich railway, was a married man with three children when he went off with a Miss Harriet Hayward. She was the daughter of Philip Hayward and if you go to Brandon in Suffolk there is a lot about Philip Hayward there – including his house. In 1790 he had negotiated a deal with the Board of Ordnance to supply flints for guns and other weaponry from Brandon where it went on to become a major industry.  The main pub in Brandon is ‘The Flint Knappers’ . Now – that Mr Clabberknapper.  ‘Clabber’ is an old word for flint. So that, pre 1790s, production of flints for the Ordnance was from somewhere in North Kent. Flint is a crucial component  of weaponry made in the Arsenal and also in the Government Small Arms factory then in Lewisham. If  anyone has any idea where this source of flints was please let us know. 

It’s a shame we don’t seem to have many Dene Holes in Greenwich and Woolwich. However in 1878 a number of shafts appears on Blackheath and  Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarians set up an Exploration Committee.  They found three holes and the Exploration Committee, having not got very far, fixed metal plates at the sites of where the holes were found. They then went off leaving instructions about how to find the sites again. Despite the instructions and the plates marking the site, as far as I know nobody has ever found either the sites or the plates.  I’m copying out the instructions below in case anybody fancies haing a go at them.  Many have tried in the past but that does not say we should give up

.  line up the water tower on Shooters Hill above the porch of 7 Str. German’s Place and walk along the line until you can line up the spire of St Marys Church over  Montpelier Road 

start by finding St Marys Church Spire over the steeple of the Wesleyan Church in Blackheath  Village at the point where it crosses the line for All Saints Church over the centre of the Hollies, 1 Talbot houses

line up St Marys spire over the flagstaff of the Prince of Wales Tavern with a line from St John’s Church over 15 Shooters Hill Rd

  Good Luck  

Some reference material:

Rod le Gear Underground Kent

Ro le Gear Pillared Deneholes at Stankey Wood, Bexley https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/sites/default/files/archcant/1977%2092%20Pillared%20Deneholes%20at%20Stankey%20Wood%20Bexley%20LeGear.pdf

Chelsea Speleological Society vol 4.S Deneholes H.Pearman 1966