Pixie's Hole

Pixie's Hole is a limestone cave on the south side of Chudleigh Rock, above the Kate Brook valley near Chudleigh on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. From the entrance, a passage runs east for around 30 metres to a chamber known as Pope's Chamber. The cave has been a Scheduled Monument since 1992.

The geologist William Buckland investigated the cave in 1825, but his findings were inconclusive. It was not until excavations in the late 1970s, working about 10 metres inside the entrance, that a rich concentration of Late Upper Palaeolithic flint artefacts and animal bones was found sealed beneath a stalagmite floor. The discovery is considered a rare example in Britain of a surviving Upper Palaeolithic "living floor," a layer of material left by people using the cave thousands of years ago and then protected from later disturbance by the stalagmite crust forming over it.

The cave's name comes from Dartmoor and Devon pixie folklore, in which the district's limestone caves and clefts were popularly said to be pixie dwellings.

Source: Wikipedia.

Photo: "Entrance to Fairy's Hole, Chudleigh Rocks" by Partonez, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.