Underworld

The Morning

Some landscapes alter how you see the world above them. A couple of years ago, I had my first experience in vertical caving. It was a November morning, and it had snowed heavily the night before. The air was cold but still, with listless white skies and a blanket of quiet. We'd been instructed to bring wellies, warm socks and marigolds, and I bundled into Becky's car with a thermos and thoughts of dark, forgotten underworlds.

I need to sit in a cave

Looking back, more than anything that month, I needed to sit in a cave. I had left a hostile working environment a few months earlier and was still trying to trust myself again. To make things. To put them into the world. I'd lost touch with the current of my intuition. Burnt out after a difficult resignation, I found myself deflated by every landscape around me: the grey slush outside my front door; the creative industry, where women's voices still don't seem to carry very far.

The Descent

We wore thick cotton canvas overalls, and our expedition began with a traipse into the woods surrounding Matlock. Smoking chimney stacks, white roofs and the effort of dragging wellies through snow. Our instructor, Leon, halted when he came to a gnarled tree and identified the entrance to an old mine shaft. It was padlocked for safety, with only a few solitary caving instructors and organisations in the area holding a key. Leon set up a traversing anchor between the surrounding trees, and before long I was belaying down into the mine. There was no room to extend any limbs, just the salty smell of earth and a new kind of silence seeping into my mind from all sides. I was discovering a new landscape that exists beneath our own, in total quiet. One where it's possible to experience such self-forgetfulness that your worries have all but melted away once you surface again.

The sensory world

Being in darkness so dense you can taste it was delicious. Honing in on passing smells and sounds, near and far, I found myself mapping the invisible space in my mind's eye. I felt connected to everyone who had passed through this passage at some point in time. Time was abstract down there, and the miners and the Victorian spelunking enthusiasts had been there only moments before us, marking their initials into the walls with charred candle wicks.

We were naturals, apparently. Adept at small spaces and seemingly at ease. The thing is, I really did feel at ease. My movements had become small, instinctive and necessary. Each one solving the next. I shifted my weight onto one side so I could push through there, then brought up one arm, then used my hip as a counterbalance and twisted around. Small motions, small repetitions, moving through tunnels and caverns alike with a kind of cadence.

We moved on to a more technical cave after that. Forty-five minutes on our chests, with cold water pressing back up against us and soft earth beneath our hands as we commando crawled forward. Above us was one of the largest fossilised oyster beds in Europe. When we tilted our heads up, hundreds of thousands of impressions of teardrop shells glimmered into eternity. Like looking up at the Sistine Chapel, but just inches from your face, where you could almost taste it: salt and rock and ancient air.

The flow stone

Cave choreography became magnified and low, and I felt reptilian as the water started to warm to my body temperature. It was comfortable, actually, peaceful, and the air was warmer there than on the surface. The flow stone looked exactly as the name suggested: stone etched by the powerful passage of water over time. Carving minute ripples in a roar of foam over centuries. Thousands of gallons of water reduced to an echo in the rock. We turned off our head torches to experience absolute darkness. A secret joy. My ears pricked at every far-off water droplet and reverberating rustle.

Pearls

Leon showed us a cave pearl, a tiny piece of grit that had become caught in the endless cycle of water droplets falling from a stalagmite. Over time, this piece of grit calcified and spun, rotating steadily in the water over years and years until it eventually became a tiny glistening orb. Before we left the caves, we spotted another pearl. Soft and delicate, incandescent in the light of our head torches, hung a cluster of spider eggs. Swaddled in a giant teardrop of webbing, suspended by a tendril in a crevice of calcified rock.