Today I had the opportunity to visit and be inspired by two underground sites: Chislehurst Caves and the tunnels of Fort Amherst. Here are a few photographs from my visits:
The most impressive (and expressive) experience of my visit to Chislehurst was when my guide Jason took away the lantern I had been carrying and his own torch - I closed my eyes for 10 seconds as he moved away and then opened them to pitch blackness.
This was blackness that was so completely black that it didn't feel like black any more; it seemed textured and mottled brown. A trick my brain was playing on me?
I experienced deafening silence (having only moments before moved through part of the caves system where I could hear constant dripping of water) then sudden strange reverberations as Jason beat a piece of metal with a drum stick, and it felt like the whole world was reverberating.
Then I could sense Jason approaching because of his voice but couldn’t see him at all, and when he turned on his torch he was only one, maybe two metres in front of me. Even though I knew he was there from his voice it startled me, shocked me to the core and I laughed nervously.
Without sight, my hearing became more acute, but I still hadn’t been able to sense just how close he had got to me before turning on the torch.
Jason and I spoke about the different sound qualities in different parts of the caves and Jason said the ‘Celtic’ (or Druid) section where we were standing had a much greater warmth of echo for example. All of this made me think about my previous post on the 'singing cave', and the association between the places in caves where people chose to create paintings and their accoustic strangeness or significance.