“Where Hamps and Manifold, their cliffs among,
Each in his flinty channel winds along,
With lucid lines the dusky moor divides,
Hurrying to intermix their sister tides,
Where still their silver-bosom’d nymphs abhor
The blood-smear’d mansion of gigantic Thor—
Erst fires volcanic in the marble womb
Of cloud-wrapp’d Whetton rais’d the massy dome;
Rocks rear’d on rocks, in huge disjointed piles,
Form the tall turrets, and the lengthen’d aisles;
Broad pond’rous piers sustain the roof, and wide
Branch the vast rainbow ribs from side to side.
While from above, descends, in milky streams,
One scanty pencil of illusive beams,
Suspended crags, and gaping gulfs illumes,
And gilds the horrors of the deepen’d glooms.
Here oft the Naiads, as they chanc’d to stray
Near the dread Fane, on Thor’s returning day,
Saw from red altars streams of guiltless blood,
Stain their green reed-beds, and pollute their flood;
Heard dying babes in wicker prisons wail,
And shrieks of matrons thrill the affrighted gale;
While from dark caves infernal echoes mock,
And fiends triumphant shout from every rock!”—DARWIN.
This spacious cavern is situated about two miles above Dove dale, near
the village of Whetton; and tradition says the Druids here offered human
sacrifices, inclosed in wicker idols, to Thor, the principal deity of
the Saxons and Danes, in the ages of their idolatrous worship. Beneath
is an extensive and romantic common, where the rivers Hamps and Manifold
sink into the earth, and rise again in Islam gardens. These rivers merit
a brief description. A wooden bridge has been thrown over an abyss in
the rock, out of which the river Manifold bursts with surprising force,
after having pursued a subterraneous course of five miles, from the
point where it had engulfed itself in the earth, called Weston hill. At
the further distance of twenty yards a similar phenomenon occurs; for
here another fissure of a rock presents itself, whence the river Hamps
throws its water into day. This river disappears at Leek-water Houses, a
place between Leek and Ashbourn; thus pursuing a subterraneous course of
seven miles, before it again emerges into light. On their emersion, the
temperatures of the two rivers differ two degrees and a half, the Hamps
being the coldest.