The Hellfire Caves

Chalk tunnels at West Wycombe that Sir Francis Dashwood had dug, which tradition links to the Hell Fire Club. A local legend says a ghost called Sukie haunts them.

Subterranea Britannica, in a 2021 piece by Neil Iosson, describes the caves as a large folly cut into the chalk in the 1740s on the site of an earlier open quarry. Sir Francis Dashwood, the second baronet, who owned the land and nearby West Wycombe House, commissioned them. The piece says the work is thought to have given local people jobs after several poor harvests, and to reflect a fashion for grottoes among the wealthy on the Grand Tour. The caves' own website dates the digging to 1748-54.

The official site says that, by tradition, Dashwood's Hell Fire Club moved its meetings to the caves after leaving Medmenham Abbey. It quotes the diary of Lybbe Powys, who visited in 1796: a small pool crossed on stepping stones, once said to need a boat, and a tall round chamber at the far end with a hook in its vaulted roof for a lamp. Wikipedia says the club had ceased by the early 1760s.

Wikipedia reports a local legend that Sukie, a young maid, haunts the caves. She is said to have died by accident when people played a prank on her. Others, it says, claim to have seen Paul Whitehead, once the club's steward, as a ghost there. In 2008 a member of the caves' staff told Katy Lewis of the BBC that many customers bring photographs they say show light orbs or Sukie, whom the staff member described as a woman dressed in white.