The Room Behind the Rock Face.

During one of my return trips from Ashbourne in the community transport bus recently, we had an extra passenger – an elderly lady who lived in a village about seven miles from here. We dropped her off first, and the house she lived in was one of a run of stone-built terraces fronting onto the main road. Access to the house, however, was gained by way of a dark, narrow passage at the back, and on the other side of the passage was a rock face which I estimated to be around fifty feet high. Apart from the physical discomfort of feeling hemmed in, the house must have received very little light through the windows at the rear.

But it got better…

The rock face continued beyond the terraced houses to be in full view of the road, and what a forbidding aspect it presented: damp, dark brown sandstone which appeared to have water constantly running down the face from the land above. And then I noticed something extraordinary. The rock face had a door and two windows in it. I wondered whether they might have been some kind of whimsical curio because surely there was nothing behind them, or so I thought.

The following week I asked a different driver whether he was familiar with this oddity. He was, he said, and told me that there is indeed a room behind the door, and that somebody once lived in it.

Lived? Lived how? Did this room have gas or electricity? Did it have running water (apart from what was running down the outside walls)? Did it have a fireplace to provide heat in the winter, and if so, was there a chimney driven up through fifty feet of rock to let the smoke out? He didn’t know, but in all my life I’ve never seen such a ‘dwelling’ and had no idea that such a thing might exist.

But then it’s a well attested fact that during the Middle Ages and a little beyond, there were people living in caves dotted around the various dales in this area. To people such as those I expect having a room in a rock face complete with a door and two windows would have been quite the height of luxury.