The Hellfire Caves, West Wycombe

I went to the Dashwood Mausoleum and the Hellfire Caves in West Wycombe a couple of weeks ago. The weather was a bit stormy at the time, so it was more than usually atmospheric, if rather slippery on the way up to the monument. The hexagonal Dashwood Mausoleum and the Golden-Ball topped church stand on the hill overlooking West Wycombe Park. Further down, another folly, resembling the facade of an abbey, rises above the entrance to the caves, which wind into the hill.

Due to the inclement weather, I had the whole place to myself. My dog insisted on coming, which was unfortunate for him as he had to wait tied up outside the caves, (unfortunate also for the back of the car). The caves in question were once the meeting the notorious Hellfire Club. They consist of deep artificial passages with Gothic arches, and various chambers and cells carved out of the chalky rock. Very spooky, echoing to the crunch of one's footsteps on the gravelly floor, sending the imagination into overdrive about the dark doings that may have gone on there during the heyday of Hellfire Club in the mid eighteenth-century. The Club was a founded by the roguish aristocrat Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-1781). At its meetings, the 'great and good', including members of the government of the day, indulged in debauchery, tomfoolery and blasphemous ritual, along with local wenches.

The Club mockingly styled itself after a religious Order. Its other titles were the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe (1708-1781), the Monks of Medmenham and the Order of the Knights of West Wycombe. The females who attended were called nuns, but vows of chastity were hardly the order of the day. The club met first in a former Cistercian abbey at Medmenham and then in the caves. It is said Dashwood he has the caves dug out in order to provide work for unemployed tenants. This, however, strikes me as an attempt, on the part of more recent Dashwoods, to put a positive gloss on his motives of their notorious ancestor. Sir Francis was a prankster and apparently a dabbler in the occult. When in Rome, he reputedly sprang on the faithful at prayer in the darkened Sistine Chapel, during the Good Friday Mass, whipping left and right. He was encouraged to continue on his travels without delay. His other grand tours took him to Turkey and Russia, making a splash everywhere he went. (He retained a taste for Turkish costumes).


The club adopted from Francois Rabelais' Thelema the motto Fay ce que voudras (Do what thou will), which would become also the motto of Aleister Crowley. Sir Francis Dashwood was also an MP and many powerful men were part of the club. He was also said to have been a Jacobite, and an initiate of Rosicrucianism and of Freemasonry. The Hellfire club was primarily an excuse for theatrical tomfoolery and possibly blackmail, but it may also have absorbed elements of the Templarist mysticism that was starting to surround Masonic circles in Europe. (Coincidentally the medieval Templars had possessed land at Wycombe.)

Another prominent member of the secret society was the Earl of Sandwich, who apparently received a shock when another member unleashed a baboon at him, which the earl mistook for the actual Devil, come to claim his soul. The artist Hogarth was also said to be involved, as was the political radical John Wilkes. Even Benjamin Franklin dropped by... Naturally there is a lot of talk about the caves being associated with the occult and the supernatural, but I didn't see any ghosts when I was there. The passages culminate in a chamber called the Inner Temple, reached after crossing the River Styx, now containing some slightly dodgy modern waxworks of Dashwood and his carousing cohorts.