# Wookey Hole Caves

series of limestone caverns in Somerset county, England

St Cuthbert Out, United Kingdom

Settlement. British Iron Age, Romano-British period

## Story

• Wookey Hole Caves are limestone caverns in the village of Wookey Hole, on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills near Wells in Somerset, and the River Axe rises through them.
• The side caves were used in the Stone Age, while the main cave was used in the Iron Age and the Romano-British period, including as a burial place in the fourth chamber.
• Herbert E. Balch excavated the deposits in the early twentieth century, and the caves were opened as a show cave in 1926 or 1927.
• Jack Sheppard (cave diver), Graham Balcombe, and Penelope Powell made the first successful cave dives in Britain here in 1935.
• Divers recovered two late Roman pots in 2019, and after a flood on 4 October 2020 they brought up more human bone, which went on display in 2021.

## Visiting

Visitors are asked to book in advance, because the site is busy in the school holidays. Off-peak adult admission is £24.99, or £21.24 when booked in advance. Off-peak child admission is £19.99, or £16.99 when booked in advance. Off-peak senior admission is £21.99, or £18.69 when booked in advance.
Peak adult admission is £28.99, or £24.64 when booked in advance. Peak child admission is £22.99, or £19.54 when booked in advance. Peak senior admission is £24.99, or £21.24 when booked in advance. Adult tickets are for ages 16 to 59, child tickets are for ages 3 to 15 and require an accompanying adult or carer, and senior tickets are for ages 60 and over.
Advance tickets booked one day or more ahead save 15 percent, and tickets bought on the day or at the admissions desk do not receive that saving outside an enhanced summer discount period. A carer ticket is free when the carer accompanies a paying guest and shows a Blue Badge, a DLA letter, a PIP letter, or a Carers Card, and any further carer needs the same proof or pays the standard admission. Tickets are valid only on the selected date and cannot be exchanged or refunded if they are not used. Peak season first admission is 9.30am and last admission is 3.30pm, and the attractions close at 5.00pm, during Somerset school holidays and at weekends from April.
Off-peak first admission is 10am and last admission is 3pm, and the attractions close at 4.30pm, on Monday to Friday outside school holidays and at weekends in January, February, and March apart from half-term. Opening hours exclude midweek days from Monday 2 November 2026 until 12 February 2027, except every day of the December school holidays, when the site is open for Winter Wonderland. The site is closed on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Dogs are not allowed except guide dogs and assistance dogs, and proof of eligibility may be requested.
Barefoot visits are not allowed, and flip-flops and high heels are not allowed, because the cave floor is wet and uneven. Buggies are not allowed through the caves, and small children have to be carried because of the steps. The cave tour lasts about 40 minutes, and at busy times there is no separate timed entry. After heavy rain the caves remain on the same opening hours, because the flow of water is controlled.
Circus shows are included in the admission at weekends and during Somerset school holidays, except in January and February until half-term. All-day tickets include one round of adventure golf, issued on the day and not valid by themselves. Vintage penny machines and some mill rides are not covered by the admission and cost extra. Tickets allow re-entry on the same day.
Tesco vouchers may be used against the standard admission and may not be combined with another discount. One offer takes 10 percent off standard day tickets for NHS, police, fire, teaching staff, and the forces, for the ticket holder and up to three guests. Another offer takes 15 percent off standard day tickets for NHS staff, teachers, police, the fire service, and the forces, on the same terms. There is a free car park on the site, and overnight camping is not allowed.
The operator may close the site, change the opening hours, or change the admission without notice.

## History

Wookey Hole Caves are limestone caverns on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills, in the village of Wookey Hole near Wells in Somerset. The River Axe runs through them and leaves at a resurgence. Acidic groundwater dissolved the rock, first in Triassic Dolomitic Conglomerate and then in Carboniferous Limestone. About 4,000 metres of passage, in 25 chambers, have been explored, and the full extent is still unknown.

The side caves keep a Stone Age sequence that the main cave does not. Badger Hole and the Hyaena Den have produced Neanderthal tools, early modern human blade points, and Mesolithic remains, and Rhinoceros Hole has a Middle Palaeolithic handaxe. A study of the main cave found no human activity there before the Iron Age. Cheddar Man, from Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, is part of the same Somerset upland and is not a burial from Wookey Hole.

People used the main cave in the Iron Age, possibly around 250 to 300 BC, and again in the Romano-British centuries. One reading places that later use from the early second century to the late fourth, with little sign that it ran straight on from the Iron Age. An older coin list runs from Vespasian to Valentinian II. The late use looks domestic, with cooking pots, spindle-whorls, and small-scale work in metal and bone, perhaps only in season.

The fourth chamber was a burial place. The dead have been counted both as at least ten people, mostly young and apparently incomplete, and as at least 28 people of both sexes, from infants to about 35 years old. Herbert Balch excavated the entrance deposits in the early twentieth century. A skeleton he found in 1908 and called a goatherd was later turned into the witch of the show cave, but the bones are probably those of a man of about 25 to 35, and the femur and the humerus do not share one date.

The water powered a mill by 1086 and a paper works from about 1610. The caves were opened more widely in 1927, a year also given as 1926. In 1935 Penelope Powell and Graham Balcombe made the first successful cave dive in Britain here, in the line of work begun with Jack Sheppard (cave diver).

Later divers followed the river to a depth of 90 metres. Gerry Cottle afterwards ran the show cave and added a circus school. In 2019 divers brought up two late Roman pots, and after the flood of 4 October 2020 they recovered more human bone from the old burial deposits, placed on display in 2021.

## Photographs

- [Wookey Hole and mill leat — Pierre Terre](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/WookeyHole.jpg)
- [Cave diving equipment in the museum at Wookey Hole Caves — Rodw](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Cave_diving_equipment.JPG)
- [Wookey Hole. The exit of the caves at Wookey Hole. — Pam Brophy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Wookey_Hole_-_geograph.org.uk_-_740.jpg)
- [Say Cheese Cheddar cheese maturing under ground in the consistent temperature of Wookey Hole. This tunnel was man made originally to give better access to for — Simon Scurr](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Say_Cheese_-_geograph.org.uk_-_357943.jpg)
- [Entrance to Wookey Hole Cave The mill leat runs off to the right. — Trevor Rickard](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Entrance_to_Wookey_Hole_Cave_-_geograph.org.uk_-_716785.jpg)
- [Wookey Hole caves After entering the modern dry entrance to the caves the tour descends "Hell's Ladder" to this chamber. The water below feeds the River Axe — Jim Champion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Wookey_Hole_caves_-_geograph.org.uk_-_937422.jpg)
- [Cheese store Cheddar cheese is stored at Wookey Hole caves at a constant temperature of 11c — william](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Cheese_store_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1250485.jpg)
- [Wookey Hole caves Cave chamber at Wookey Hole — william](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Wookey_Hole_caves_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1250476.jpg)
- [Wookey Hole Cave and underground river — Becks](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Wookey_Hole_Cave_and_underground_river_%287065267791%29.jpg)
- [Skeleton in Wells and Mendip Museum labelled as the Witch of Wookey Hole — Rodw](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Skeleton_in_Wells_and_Mendip_Museum.JPG)

## Sources

- [Wookey Hole Caves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wookey_Hole_Caves) — Wikipedia
- [Herbert E. Balch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_E._Balch) — Wikipedia
- [Penelope Powell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Powell) — Wikipedia
- [Graham Balcombe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Balcombe) — Wikipedia
- [Jack Sheppard (cave diver)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sheppard_(cave_diver)) — Wikipedia
- [Gerry Cottle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Cottle) — Wikipedia
- [Cheddar Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Man) — Wikipedia
- [Stone Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Age) — Wikipedia
- [Somerset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset) — Wikipedia
- [Wookey Hole opening times and admission](https://www.wookey.co.uk/wookey-hole-opening-times) — Wookey Hole
- [Wookey Hole day tickets](https://wookeyholecaves.digitickets.co.uk/event-tickets/54747?branches.branchID=3233) — Wookey Hole
- [The Romano-British finds from Wookey Hole: a re-appraisal](https://sanhs.org/wp-content/uploads/04BraniganDearne.pdf) — Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society
- [New radiocarbon dates for sites around Wells](https://sanhs.org/wp-content/uploads/ShorterPapers-2.pdf) — Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society
- [Wookey Hole cave](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/7ae57b43-b498-445d-8bed-e1e4f9b8947c/24355) — Historic England
- [Badger Hole, Wookey](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1010294) — Historic England
- [Rhinoceros Hole, Wookey](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1010292) — Historic England
- [Badger Hole cave, Wookey Hole](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/7ae57b43-b498-445d-8bed-e1e4f9b8947c/24354) — Historic England
- [Prehistoric and Roman occupation, Hole Ground, Wookey Hole](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/7ae57b43-b498-445d-8bed-e1e4f9b8947c/24440) — Historic England
- [Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Wookey Bones](https://indepthmag.com/dem-bones-dem-bones-dem-wookey-bones/) — InDEPTH
- [A report on two Romano-British vessels recently recovered from Wookey Hole Cave](https://www.ubss.org.uk/resources/proceedings/vol28/UBSS_Proc_28_1_137-141.pdf) — University of Bristol Spelaeological Society
- [WookeyHole.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WookeyHole.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cave diving equipment.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cave_diving_equipment.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wookey Hole - geograph.org.uk - 740.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wookey_Hole_-_geograph.org.uk_-_740.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Say Cheese - geograph.org.uk - 357943.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Say_Cheese_-_geograph.org.uk_-_357943.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Entrance to Wookey Hole Cave - geograph.org.uk - 716785.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Entrance_to_Wookey_Hole_Cave_-_geograph.org.uk_-_716785.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wookey Hole caves - geograph.org.uk - 937422.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wookey_Hole_caves_-_geograph.org.uk_-_937422.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cheese store - geograph.org.uk - 1250485.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cheese_store_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1250485.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wookey Hole caves - geograph.org.uk - 1250476.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wookey_Hole_caves_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1250476.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wookey Hole Cave and underground river (7065267791).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wookey_Hole_Cave_and_underground_river_(7065267791).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Skeleton in Wells and Mendip Museum.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skeleton_in_Wells_and_Mendip_Museum.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Wookey Hole Caves are a series of limestone caverns, a show cave, and a tourist attraction in the village of Wookey Hole, in the parish of St Cuthbert Out, on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills near the city of Wells in Somerset. The River Axe flows through the cave and leaves it at a resurgence. The caves are a Site of Special Scientific Interest for both biological and geological reasons. They are a solutional cave, formed where the natural acid in groundwater dissolves the rock. Some of the water begins as rain that runs in streams across impervious rocks on the plateau and sinks at the limestone boundary into systems such as Swildon's Hole, Eastwater Cavern, and St Cuthbert's Swallet. The rest is rain that percolates straight down through the limestone. The temperature inside is an annual average of 11 °C, or 52 °F. That steady cool has also been used to mature Cheddar cheese.

Wookey Hole lies on the southern escarpment of the Mendips and is the resurgence that drains the southern flanks of North Hill and Pen Hill. It is the second-largest resurgence on Mendip. The estimated catchment is 46.2 square kilometres, or 17.8 square miles, and the average discharge is 789 litres a second, which is 174 imperial gallons or 208 US gallons. About 95 percent of the water is autogenic, meaning it has soaked directly into the limestone, and the rest is allogenic water gathered on non-limestone rocks before it sinks, often at swallets such as Plantation Swallet near St Cuthbert's lead works, between the Hunter's Lodge Inn and Priddy Pools. It then passes through major caves around Priddy, including Swildon's Hole, Eastwater Cavern, and St Cuthbert's Swallet.

The southern slopes of the Mendip Hills largely follow the flanks of an anticline, a fold whose oldest beds sit at the core and whose crest has been worn down to a plateau. The strata dip 10 to 15 degrees to the southwest. The outer slopes are mainly Carboniferous Limestone, with Devonian Old Red Sandstone exposed as an inlier at the centre. The cave is solutional and was formed mainly in that limestone, but it is unusual because the first part is cut in Triassic Dolomitic Conglomerate, a well-cemented fossil limestone scree that fills a Triassic valley. It formed under phreatic conditions, below the local water table. As the base level of the drainage fell, some passages were abandoned, and there are traces of several old resurgences. The passages of the twentieth chamber are read as a former Vauclusian spring whose water once came out in the Ebbor Gorge. It is not certain whether that was the original rising, or whether it formed when the main rising at Wookey was blocked. The present resurgence sits close to the base of the Dolomitic Conglomerate, at the head of a short gorge cut by headward erosion and later cavern collapse. In the conglomerate the streamway is a chain of shallow loops linking low bedding chambers, or tall narrow rifts opened along fractures. In the limestone farther in, the streamway makes deep phreatic loops, as much as 90 metres or 300 feet, the water travelling down-dip along bedding planes and rising up enlarged joints. In the far passages the cave descends to 26 metres, or 85 feet, below sea level.

About 4,000 metres of passage, about 13,000 feet, have been explored, in 25 chambers, and the full extent is still unknown. The original show cave was a dry gallery joining three large chambers. The first holds the Witch of Wookey, a roughly human-shaped stalagmite. High-level passages leave these chambers, and two small exits sit above the tourist entrance. The River Axe occupies the east side of the chambers and is higher now than it was in the Romano-British period because a dam was inserted, which also flooded the fourth chamber. The river runs through the third and first chambers and then through two sumps, 40 metres and 30 metres long, or 131 and 98 feet, before it reaches open air. A sluice can drop the river a couple of metres so that the fourth and fifth chambers, two small air spaces, can be entered. In ordinary conditions those chambers are reached only by diving. Beyond the fifth chamber a roomy submerged route continues for about another 40 metres, or 130 feet, under three large rifts with air spaces, and surfaces in the ninth chamber, a room more than 30 metres, or 98 feet, long and the same in height. High-level passages there lead to a former resurgence, now blocked, about 45 metres, or 148 feet, above the present one.

Since 1974 a man-made tunnel 180 metres, or 590 feet, long has left the third chamber, crossed the seventh and eighth chambers on bridges, and skirted the ninth on a walkway before coming out near the resurgence. That tunnel was dug in 1974 and 1975 by former coal miners from the Radstock area. A second tunnel, 74 metres or 243 feet, was blasted in 2015 from the ninth chamber so that visitors could reach the twentieth. From the ninth chamber a dive of about 200 metres, or 660 feet, passes almost at once from the Dolomitic Conglomerate into the limestone and descends for 70 metres, or 230 feet, to a depth of 23 metres, or 75 feet, under high rifts with airbells, before air is reached in the nineteenth chamber. The twentieth chamber is at the top of a boulder slope 60 metres or 200 feet long, 15 metres or 49 feet wide, and 22 metres or 72 feet high. From there a roomy passage some 400 metres, or 1,300 feet, long climbs toward a blocked fossil resurgence in the Ebbor Gorge. The passages in that area total about 820 metres, or 2,690 feet. A passage near the end joins Chamber 24 near Sting Corner.

The way on from the nineteenth chamber is 152 metres, or 499 feet, of passage descending to 24 metres, or 79 feet, and surfacing in the twenty-second chamber, where about 300 metres, or 980 feet, of dry passage sit at several levels around a static pool. The continuation is in that pool at 19 metres, or 62 feet. A hundred metres, or 330 feet, of passage then rises into the twenty-third chamber, another 100 metres of large passage, followed by four short sumps into the twenty-fourth. That chamber is 370 metres, or 1,210 feet, of river passage described as magnificent, 13 metres or 43 feet high and 2 metres or 6.6 feet wide, ending at a cascade from a lake 30 metres, or 98 feet, long. Another account of the same passage gives it as 40 feet high by five feet wide, which is about 12 metres by 1.5 metres, and as ending in a blue lake after 90 metres, or 300 feet. More than 370 metres of high-level passage lie above the river. The underwater way continues for about 100 metres, or 330 feet, to a depth of 25 metres, or 82 feet, and surfaces in the twenty-fifth chamber, called the Lake of Gloom because of its thick mud. The sump beyond has been dived for 400 metres, or 1,300 feet, to a maximum depth of 90 metres, or 300 feet, where gravel chokes stopped further progress. That end lies about 1,000 metres, or 1,100 yards, northeast of the entrance. Water samples taken through the cave in 1996 and 1997 had different chemical compositions, and the Unknown Junction, which feeds the static sump in the twenty-second chamber by a route different from most of the River Axe, lies upstream of the sump in the twenty-fifth.

Fossils of Late Pleistocene animals have been found at Wookey Hole: cave lion, cave hyena, Arctic fox, woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, Irish elk, brown bear, red deer, reindeer, wild horse, and probably steppe bison. During the Last Glacial Period, cave hyenas are thought to have used the caves as a den, especially the Hyaena Den, and to have gathered many of the animal bones. Badger Hole, as the name implies, has been heavily used by badgers, which have disturbed its sediments. Badger Hole and Rhinoceros Hole are dry caves on the slopes above the Wookey ravine, near the resurgence, and they still hold Ice Age sediments in place.

The Stone Age was the long prehistoric stretch in which stone was the ordinary material for tools with an edge, a point, or a striking surface. It lasted on the order of 3.4 million years and, as a general period, ended between 4000 BC and 2000 BC with the spread of metalworking. It is the first of the three ages used in European archaeology, followed by the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and it is itself split into the Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and the Neolithic. In that general scheme, Europe is said to have moved beyond the Stone Age by about 4000 BC, while the Mendip caves keep a local sequence that runs from early stone tools through a much later Iron Age. At Wookey the early human evidence sits in the side caves. A reappraisal of the main cave found no sign of human activity there before the Iron Age, unlike many other Mendip caves. The main system is probably the largest single English cave system used in the Iron Age and the Romano-British period, and only its first four chambers are of archaeological importance. The rest could not be reached before modern diving, much of which was pioneered here.

Wookey Hole as a whole, counting those side caves, shows human activity back to the Lower Palaeolithic, in the form of a flake related to handaxe making in Badger Hole. Middle Paleolithic tools thought to be Neanderthal work have been found in the caverns and are placed in Marine Isotope Stage 3, about 57,000 to 29,000 years ago. Most of the Neanderthal pieces at Wookey Hole come from the Hyaena Den, generally near the entrance, where stone was knapped on the spot. An incised red deer tooth found with those tools has a calibrated radiocarbon age of about 45,626 to 43,188 years before present. The Hyaena Den and Badger Hole have also produced leaf-shaped blade points of the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician technocomplex, of the Initial Upper Palaeolithic. Associated remains in Badger Hole date those points to 40,000 to 42,000 years ago, and they are now thought to be the work of some of the earliest modern humans in Europe. A bone or antler projectile-point fragment from the Hyaena Den has been treated as early Upper Palaeolithic Aurignacian and radiocarbon dated to about 36,578 to 34,964 calibrated years before present. Another account of Badger Hole describes Aurignacian flint implements, including knives and a lance head, a foot below a layer with a third-century Roman coin and hundreds of fragments of Romano-British pottery, together with Pleistocene animals including mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and hyena. A bone associated with a blade point gave 36,000 plus or minus 450 years, a result taken to place these pieces earlier than a previous estimate of 29,000 to 27,000 years ago, and possibly with the earliest Upper Palaeolithic in Britain, perhaps associated with Neanderthals. Mammalian bone from the cave produced too little carbon for a fuller date except to show that it was more than 18,000 years old. Badger Hole has also yielded late Upper Palaeolithic Magdalenian-type artefacts of the Creswellian. Human remains from the cave have been placed in the Mesolithic, around 8000 to 8500 BC, and the monument schedule includes a Mesolithic burial about 9,000 years ago. Accelerator dates showed that human remains once thought Palaeolithic were not, and were either Early Mesolithic or Romano-British. Neolithic stone tools have also come from Badger Hole. The cave served again as a burial place in the late Roman period, perhaps partly at the same time as a villa on the hillside above.

Badger Hole was first excavated in 1938 and afterwards by Herbert E. Balch, who found stratified occupation. It was scheduled as an ancient monument on 3 September 1992. It stands on the east side of the ravine, about 20 metres above the present valley floor and almost 11 metres below the plateau. The mouth is about 10 metres wide and 3 metres high, with a modern retaining wall. Two short passages lead to a chamber about 6 metres high, and a hole in the roof opens to the plateau, with a cone of deposit beneath it. The cave is about 20 metres long from the inner chamber to the wall. Undisturbed deposits are thought to survive at the back, on the walls, and under excavation spoil at the mouth. Flint of various ages lies around the entrance, and badgers have disturbed the deposits, but an Early Upper Palaeolithic component can still be picked out.

Rhinoceros Hole was scheduled as an ancient monument on 7 August 1992, and one account simply says 1992. It lies on the east side of the ravine, above the River Axe and the paper-mill canal, about 16 metres above the valley floor and 15 metres below the plateau, 25 metres south-southwest of Badger Hole and 15 metres south of the Hyena Den. It is a collapsed rockshelter with two short passages. Partial excavations by Balch around 1900, and by Edgar Kingsley Tratman between 1970 and 1975, found a thick cave earth over waterlain silts and sands. In those silts and sands were a Middle Palaeolithic handaxe and thinning flakes. The cave earth, apparently slumped from above, holds a mid-Last Glacial fauna thought to be contemporary with the artefacts. Dates on broken blocks of stalagmitic flowstone in the cave earth have been used to suggest that human activity may be documented between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago. The scheduled area includes the cave and the deposits from the walls to a strip immediately outside the entrance, 2 metres wide and 12 metres long.

Cheddar Man is a different person and a different cave. He is the name given to the nearly complete skeleton of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer found in December 1903 in Gough's Cave, in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, during drainage work near the entrance. One account says he lived around 8300 BC, about 10,300 years ago, and probably died in his early twenties, and that his remains are the oldest nearly complete human skeleton found in Britain. Direct radiocarbon dates on that account are 8540 to 7990 BC and 8470 to 8230 BC. A county account instead dates Cheddar Man to 7150 BCE, and dates other bones from Gough's Cave to 12,000 BCE. He was an adult male, about 166 centimetres or 5 feet 5 inches tall and about 66 kilograms or 146 pounds. Genetic analysis, limited by incomplete data, suggests he most likely had blue-green eyes, dark brown or black hair, and dark or dark-to-black skin, and that he lacked the adaptation for digesting milk in adulthood. About 85 percent of his ancestry has been modelled on the Late Upper Paleolithic Villabruna cluster, and about 15 percent on the Goyet Q2 cluster associated with the Magdalenian. His mitochondrial DNA was read as U5a in 1996 and as U5b1 in 2018. His Y-DNA belongs to I-S2524. No objects can be securely called grave goods. A wildcat canine was certainly associated with him, and a perforated antler baton found near him was later placed with the much earlier Magdalenian use of the same cave. Skull damage once read as a fatal injury is now thought more likely to be after death, and a lesion above the right eye socket may be an infection. Whether the body was a primary burial with the limbs bent, or bones gathered after the flesh had gone, has been argued both ways. A 2025 review found no cut marks and favoured a primary burial. His solitary grave contrasts with Aveline's Hole, about 1.6 kilometres away, where the remains of about 50 people were deposited over roughly 100 to 200 years. His skeleton is displayed in London, on loan from the Longleat Estate, beside a 2018 facial reconstruction by Adrie and Alfons Kennis. He is not a burial from Wookey Hole. The link is regional: the Mendip caves, including Cheddar Gorge, hold the Stone Age sequence of Somerset, and a later diver at Wookey went on to work at Gough's Cave.

The name has been explained in more than one way. One suggestion derives Wookey from a Celtic word for cave, ogo or ogof, which produced the early forms Ochie and Ochy. Hole is the Anglo-Saxon word for a cave, itself of Latin and Norman derivation, so that Wookey Hole Cave would mean cave three times over. Another derivation takes Wookey from Old English wocig, a noose or snare for animals. By the eighteenth century the caves were commonly called Okey Hole. John Beaumont, a geologist, first described them in print in 1681, under that name. Somerset itself is the ceremonial county around the caves. The name most likely comes from Old English Sumorsǣte, the people of Somerton, and it is one of the oldest surviving units of local government in England, named in the laws of Ine, king of Wessex from 688 to 726. The county motto Sumorsǣte ealle, all the people of Somerset, was adopted in 1911 from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and refers to the support given to Alfred against Viking attack. The Mendip Hills fill the north-east of the county. Wells, the nearby city, is described as the second-smallest city in England by population. The River Axe is one of the rivers that drain the Somerset Levels. A county estimate for 2024 gives Somerset 1,012,934 people and an area of 4,171 square kilometres, or 1,610 square miles.

The main cave was used by people in the Iron Age, possibly around 250 to 300 BC. The cave as far as the third chamber and the side galleries has been known at least since then. Before a dam was built at the resurgence to feed the paper mill, the fourth and fifth chambers were also accessible on foot. William Buckland's visit, published in 1823, was the first recorded archaeological work of note: he collected human bones from the river, perhaps near the stalagmite called the Witch. William Boyd Dawkins seems to have done limited work, perhaps finding a hearth of Lias slabs, sometime after 1852. Dawkins had moved to Somerset to study classics with the vicar of Wookey. Between 1859 and 1874, after hearing that local workmen had found bones, he excavated in the area of the hyena den, and that work produced the first evidence then known for Palaeolithic people in the Mendip caves.

Herbert E. Balch, born Herbert Ernest Balch in Wells on 4 November 1869 and dead at home in Wells on 27 May 1958, carried the digging into the twentieth century. His parents were William Balch, a brushmaker, and Sarah Ellen Balch. He won a scholarship to The Blue School at seven, left school at fourteen, and spent his working life at Wells Post Office, rising from telegraph messenger to postmaster. He began caving with village teenagers in the mid-1880s. A talk by Dawkins turned him to cave archaeology and to stratigraphy. In the 1890s Thomas Willcox, manager of the Priddy lead mines, introduced him to the Mendip caves. At Lamb Leer in 1897 a rope snapped. Balch caught a guide rope, but the fall of 60 feet, or 18 metres, left him unconscious, burned, and injured in the back. He would not cave on Sundays. He and miners opened Swildon's Hole in 1901, finding the Forty Foot Pot, and after the farmer closed that entrance they found Eastwater Cavern. He helped found the Wells Natural History and Archaeological Society and, with Thomas Jex-Blake, Dean of Wells, the Wells Museum in 1893. The museum moved to the cathedral green in 1932 and became the Wells and Mendip Museum. Bristol University gave him an honorary Master of Arts in July 1927. He retired as postmaster on 31 March 1931, was given the freedom of the City of Wells in 1944, and served as churchwarden of St Cuthbert's in Wells. His 1914 book was Wookey Hole: Its Caves and Cave-Dwellers.

The dates of his digging at the cave are given in more than one span. A reappraisal says the major excavations ran from 1904 to 1914 and concentrated on Iron Age and Romano-British occupation in the entrance tunnel, with further work just inside the entrance before the show cave opened. His own later biography says he began the study of the Iron Age cave dwellers in 1906 and spent four years on it with the Mendip Nature Research Committee, mapping, drawing, and photographing for the 1914 book. Another account says the cave was excavated in 1908 to 1912. A further account places his work from 1904 to 1928, including the entrance passage in 1904 to 1915, the Witch's Kitchen, which is the first chamber, and Hell's Ladder in 1926 and 1927, and Badger Hole from 1938 to 1954. The 1911 work found 4 to 7 feet of stratification, which is 1.2 to 2.1 metres, mostly Iron Age and sealed by Romano-British artefacts. The finds included a silver coin of Marcia dated 124 BC, pottery from the early Iron Age into the Romano-British period, iron weapons and tools, bronze ornaments, and Roman coins from Vespasian to Valentinian II, that is from the first century to the fourth. Work in 1926 and 1927 produced many similar objects, mainly from the upper Romano-British levels. Some of the pottery was of Glastonbury type, and skulls from Wookey were said to resemble skulls from Glastonbury. The quantity Balch found is not known, and not all of it was published or recorded. In lectures he compared the cave dwellers to Eskimos in their art and hunting, and he showed tools, brooches, and what he called a child's playthings. He also told of a goatherd who had died in the cave and left the goats tethered, so that they perished too. When the show cave was about to open he directed excavations immediately inside the entrance. The main archaeological deposits were removed. Casual finds have continued since.

The political setting of the Roman material is the conquest of this part of Britain. On the authority of the future emperor Vespasian, the Second Legion Augusta invaded Somerset from the south-east in 47. The county remained in the Roman Empire until about 409, when the Roman occupation of Britain ended. A reappraisal of the Romano-British finds from the main cave, setting aside the fourth chamber and the river, concluded that there is little evidence of continuity from the Iron Age into the Roman period. The Iron Age use appears to end within a decade or so of the Roman invasion, and the Roman use not to begin until at least fifty years later. Coins suggest some second-century use, the possibility of no significant use in the early and middle third century, and then substantial use from the late third century through to the late fourth. Two brooches are probably of later first-century manufacture, but the same study thought they were deposited in the second century, with the other second-century brooches, because the coins and the pottery do not support a first-century occupation. The datable pottery is overwhelmingly of the later third and fourth centuries. Only the samian and a few black-burnished vessels sit comfortably in the second century. The summary is that Romano-British use most probably runs from the early second century to the late fourth century AD, and not at the same intensity throughout. That reading sits beside the older coin list, which runs from Vespasian to Valentinian II. The early Roman use looks slight and not domestic: a handful of coins, brooches, and samian. The scarcity of second-century coarse pottery and mortaria suggests that the bulk of the undated domestic material belongs to the late Roman period. It is possible that the first chamber, and an eastern upper gallery, was used for occasional burials in the second century, and that the fourth-century burials in the fourth chamber were a return to that practice once the first chamber was being used for something else. The lack of a clear early and middle third century may only reflect how hard that period is to see in coins, brooches, and pots.

The late third-century and late fourth-century use looks heavier and different. About ninety percent of the coinage belongs there, and so does the bulk of the datable pottery. The occupation appears domestic in a broad sense. The pottery mixes cooking and eating vessels. Animal bones were found but no longer survive in the collection. There is simple bone and bronze jewellery, tools, and implements. There is a little direct evidence of lead, iron, and bronze working, and enough bone objects to suggest they may have been made in the cave. More than thirty spindle-whorls, and thirteen unfinished examples, together with a few iron chisels, drills, and other tools, give the impression of a workshop in which several crafts were practised. Storage vessels are notably scarce, so the domestic occupation may not have been permanent or full-time. The suggestion is that in the fourth century the cave was occupied, possibly by season, for craft and production. Metalworking looks domestic. Spinning, and perhaps bone-working, might imply a surplus that could be traded. The quantity of fourth-century coinage is enough to suggest that the users took part in a money economy, but the material culture is not of high quality at any point in the Romano-British period. Another reading of the hundred or more coins sees a late fourth-century votive deposit, and several Iron Age currency bars have been read, in a wider study, as objects deposited in ritual acts more often than not. Six small bronze leaves found near the bones later called the witch were described at the time as part of a personal ornament. Similar bronze or silver leaves are known from the temples at Uley, Lydney, Woodeaton, and Lamyatt Beacon. That comparison has been used to suggest pagan religious activity in the cave, and one writer on such ceremonies has said that the officiants were quite likely to have been women, which has been asked, not asserted, as a possible root of the later witch legend.

Just outside the cave, at Hole Ground, excavations in 1954 to 1957 found the foundations of a first-century hut, surrounded by a bank and ditch, with first-century Iron Age pottery. Over those foundations were Roman buildings of modest size, dated from the first century to the late fourth, and described as a continuous occupation. Near the surface were substantial wall foundations, with fourth-century sherds and coins. Seven complete or partial skeletons of children were found. Probable fourth-century small finds of bronze, iron, and bone were scattered on the site, and hearths held semi-melted lead ore. An open Romano-British settlement close to the caves was also recorded in 1964, and was treated as outside the scope of the cave-finds study. In 1544, products of Roman lead working in the area were discovered. Lead mines across the Mendips have contaminated the water that emerges at Wookey Hole, and that lead is believed to have harmed the quality of the paper later made there.

The fourth chamber, also called the Holy Hole, held a Romano-British burial area. Divers in the underground River Axe and in that chamber from 1946 onward found human bones and skulls, pottery of the second to fourth centuries, pewter vessels, and a coin of Gratian. The chamber was excavated in short spells. The dates given are 1973 to 1977, 1973 to 1976, and 1973 to 1974. One account says the remains of at least ten people were found with Romano-British pottery and second- and third-century ornaments, and that the burials here and elsewhere in the cave may have been ritual, because they were almost all of young people and apparently not of entire bodies. Another account of an area dug to trace the human bone found by divers in 1946 says that 1,350 pieces of human bone, representing at least 28 people, were found, some in situ, with bronze jewellery and coins of 260 to 274. Those burials had been disturbed by later activity, including a fireplace probably of the eighteenth century. The published cemetery is described as at least 28 people of both sexes, aged from six months to about 35 years, with associated artefacts. A hoard of 15 antoniniani, dated to approximately 274, or to about 275, probably from a purse or a small leather bag and derived from the burials, was found at Wookey Hole in 1975. None of those cemetery bones has been radiocarbon dated, and they are not held at the Wells and Mendip Museum. The humerus date from the so-called witch is closely comparable. Balch had gone into print with the statement that it was obvious the cave folk did not bury their dead in the cave. The fourth-chamber cemetery shows that they did. A copper-alloy pin he assigned to the post-Roman or Saxon period is more likely Roman. An iron latch-lifter, which he thought opened a wooden gate in an entrance palisade, has a parallel among the burials in the fourth chamber.

The bones called the Witch of Wookey were found by Balch in October 1908, during the excavations of 1908 to 1912, disarticulated and a metre or more down in a rift beside the cave wall. In the 1914 book he described the skeleton as a goatherd and the associated objects as the goatherd's relics. The skeleton was turned into a witch in the telling at the time the show cave opened to the public, a date given as 1926 in that account and as 1927 in the account of Captain G. W. Hodgkinson opening the cave to a wider public after Balch's preparatory work. One description still calls the skeleton a thousand years old. Measurement of the humerus and scapula in August 2013, by Jackie McKinley, assessed the bones as probably those of a male aged about 25 to 35. The left femur dated to 393–206 calibrated years BC, in the Iron Age. The left humerus dated to 180–381 calibrated years AD, in the Roman period. A goat skull found with them dated to 684–881 calibrated years AD, which is also described as the seventh to ninth centuries AD. Balch noted that the right femur was missing and was later found some 20 feet away. In 2012 a museum volunteer saw that the display, probably arranged when the museum opened in 1932, had the legs the wrong way round, so the femur dated to the Iron Age may be the bone found apart from the rest. That would suggest that most of the skeleton is Roman, which sits awkwardly against associated Iron Age objects such as the so-called milking pot and a carved bone weaving comb. A letter from Tratman in 1958 to Wing Commander G. W. Hodgkinson, then the owner, said that at least two people were represented and that more digging might be worthwhile. Balch does not appear to have acknowledged that. The Iron Age date of 393–206 calibrated years BC matches the period given for the founding of the nearby Glastonbury Lake Village. The remains have been in the Wells and Mendip Museum since they were excavated. In 2004 the owner of the caves said he wanted them returned to Wookey Hole.

The legend attached to the stalagmite has several versions with the same outline. A man from Glastonbury is engaged to a young woman from Wookey. A witch living in the caves curses the match so that it fails. The man, now a monk, seeks revenge on the witch, who, having been jilted herself, spoils other romances. He follows her into the cave. She hides in a dark corner near an underground river. He blesses the water and splashes it into the dark, and the water turns her to stone. The story is a legend. The bones do not bear it out. A carved stone ball about 75 millimetres across, called in a notebook a large round pestle of stalagmite, is in fact gypsum, translucent and too soft to have served as a pestle. A 1977 survey of about 400 carved stone balls, mostly from Scotland and of Neolithic or Bronze Age date, found too little context to decide whether such balls were ritual deposits.

After the Roman occupation of Britain ended, around 409, Somerset was still in British hands about 600. By the early eighth century Ine of Wessex had pushed the West Saxon boundary far enough west to include the county. The goat skull of the seventh to ninth centuries falls in that long transition, but it does not by itself explain who brought the animal into the cave. A corn-grinding mill was using the resurgent water of the Axe as early as the Domesday survey of 1086. Part of a medieval globular cooking pot, of late Saxon and Norman type and of the eleventh to twelfth century, was later found in the river. One account places it in the second chamber in the 1940s. Another places an eleventh- or twelfth-century cooking pot among the objects divers recovered from the river bed in 1947 to 1949, together with Romano-British bowls and lead ewers and two late seventeenth-century glass bottles. In the divers' work of 1948 a lead or pewter jug of the third or fourth century was found with Roman and medieval pottery, seventeenth-century wine bottles, and many human bones. An almost identical jug had been found in the Sacred Spring of Sulis Minerva at Bath in the 1870s, where it may have been used to pour spring water or offerings of wine. Another very similar jug, found beside a spring at East Harptree in the 1860s, was filled with a hoard of about 1,500 silver coins from about 376.

Several stalagmites were taken from the first chamber in the 1740s and given to Alexander Pope for the grotto at Twickenham. The likely places they came from have been identified, but none of them can now be seen in the grotto. A large number of apotropaic marks, cut for ritual protection, have been recorded in the Witch's Chimney. They resemble marks known from houses and dated between 1550 and 1750. In the middle of the eighteenth century, workers from the paper mill are said to have built a dam across the mouth of the cave to give a head of water for the machinery. That dam is said to have raised the water by about 1.75 metres, or 5.7 feet, and to have sealed the fourth chamber except when the sluice was opened or a diver went in. The entrance weir and sluice that serve the paper mill are also dated to about 1852. The two dates may refer to different works, and both are recorded. The commercial paper mill, the oldest extant in Britain, began operations around 1610. Handmade paper was made there until February 2008. The present mill building, whose water wheel is turned by a small canal from the river, dates from around 1860 and is a Grade II listed building.

Captain G. W. Hodgkinson opened the cave to the wider public in 1927, after Balch's preparation, while the witch story is tied to an opening in 1926. Three years after the 1927 opening, John Cowper Powys wrote of the caves in the novel A Glastonbury Romance. Hodgkinson took offence at the portrait of his fictional counterpart and began a costly libel suit. Olive Hodgkinson, a cave guide whose husband's family was said to have owned the caves for more than 500 years, was a contestant on What's My Line? in 1956. In 1967 she bought the doll's house Titania's Palace and showed it in the caves until she moved to Jersey. In the late 1950s Stanley Long photographed the caves for stereoscopic souvenirs. The cave and the mill were bought by Madame Tussauds in 1973 and run together until a management buy-out in 1989. A collection of fairground art from Wookey Hole was sold at auction in 1997.

The designation of the Wookey Hole catchment, a large area of the Mendips reaching as far as Priddy Pools, as a Site of Special Scientific Interest in the 1970s and 1980s was controversial. The Council of Southern Caving Clubs, part of the British Caving Association, first proposed that the whole catchment be designated, which would have restricted farmers and other owners. Opponents called that too restrictive and hard to enforce, and argued that farming of fields not directly touching cave entrances would do little harm to the caves. There was also argument about which caves and features counted as important. The settlement designated a smaller area and removed many agricultural practices from the list of potentially damaging operations. The constant temperature of about 11 °C is used by Barber's cheesemakers of Somerset to mature Cheddar in the Cheese Tunnel, an excavated side tunnel between the ninth chamber and the show-cave exit.

Cave diving in Britain began here. Graham Balcombe and Jack Sheppard (cave diver) were Post Office telecommunications engineers, climbing partners, and, while based in Bristol, cavers on Mendip. One account says they were especially interested in Swildon's Hole because they believed it connected to the Cheddar caves. Another says they believed it connected to Wookey Hole Caves, and that they proved the link by putting dye into Swildon's and watching it come out at Wookey. Jack Sheppard was born John Arthur Sheppard at Lewisham on 31 March 1909 and died on 14 July 2001. Graham Balcombe, Francis Graham Balcombe, was born on 8 March 1907 and died on 19 March 2000. Their first attempts to pass the flooded passages used shore-based pumped-air suits, without much success. For an initial dive in 1934 they built a breathing set from household parts, including a bicycle pump and a tobacco tin. It can be seen at the Wells and Mendip Museum. That 1934 dive did not succeed. The first successful dive came the next year at Wookey Hole, using standard naval diving dress, with a copper helmet, an airline, and pumps, lent by Siebe Gorman.

Penelope Powell was Diver No. 2 on 18 August 1935, the first successful cave dive in Britain made with breathing equipment. She was born Penelope Margaret Hopper on 14 October 1904 at Kessingland in Suffolk, the eldest of three children of Dr Leonard Bushby Hopper and Mabel Elizabeth Jackson, and by 1911 the family was in Cornwall. She was the niece of the Reverend C. F. Metcalfe, an early explorer of the Mendip caves. In 1927 she married Reginald Oliver Tyndale-Powell in Penang. They had two children. She returned in 1934, they divorced, and she was living in Priddy and working at the Wookey Hole shop and caves when she dived. She later worked at Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, the cave in which Cheddar Man had been found. In 1936 she married John Baxter Wyllie, known as Jock, a housemaster at Clifton College. They had three children and in 1938 opened Tankerton School at Mundon in Essex. She died of breast cancer on Bryher, in the Isles of Scilly, on 1 October 1965. In 2023 she was entered, after her death, in the Women Divers Hall of Fame.

The 1935 team also included Frank Frost, Bill Bufton, Bill Tucknott, and Digger Harris, members of the Mendip Nature Research Society, with Balcombe leading. In July 1935 they learned to dive at Priddy Pools. Powell was third in the order on the first attempt and stayed under for 30 minutes. Seven preparatory dives through the show cave, part of which had been open since 1927, prepared the main attempt. Time made it impossible for the whole team to descend, so two divers went. Balcombe was Diver No. 1. He later wrote that the place of Diver No. 2 was given to the woman of the party, and that the choice had been justified. The suit, cut for a seaman's wrists, fitted badly at her smaller wrists. On Sunday 18 August 1935 they walked the river bed for 52 metres. One account says 170 feet and another 171 feet. The dive took three hours and was, at that date, the longest cave dive yet made. Powell said her part was to follow Balcombe and keep his guide ropes and airline from catching on the bends and rocks. He said she was there to protect him from an accident or a sudden drop, because he was at the end of the line. Both helmets had microphones, and the dive was broadcast in a programme presented by Francis Worsley. When she did not answer, the listeners feared for her. She later explained that the air bubbles had drowned the microphone, and she said it had been thrilling and that she had enjoyed it. Herbert E. Balch called her willingness the pluckiest adventure he had ever seen undertaken by a woman. She and Balcombe wrote The Log of the Wookey Hole Exploration Expedition: 1935, she writing most of it. It was issued in 1936 in a run of 175 copies.

Sheppard built his own dry suit with an oxygen rebreather and, on 4 October 1936, made the first successful cave dive in Swildon's Hole. Balcombe, a gifted rock climber of the early 1930s, had put up Buttonhook, Engineers Slabs, and the Central Buttress Direct Finish in the Lake District in a fortnight in 1934, and in 1936 he led a party of German climbers there, his last significant climbing. During the Second World War, stationed at Harrogate, he kept developing diving gear and tried it at Alum Pot, Keld Head, and Goyden Pot. In 1946 he and Sheppard were among the founders of the Cave Diving Group. Balcombe ran operations from London and gave up diving in 1957. Both men were later honorary presidents. His memoirs appeared in 2007, after his death.

Diving at Wookey resumed in early June 1946, when Balcombe used a homemade respirator and a waterproof suit between the resurgence and the first chamber, and along the underground river between the third and first chambers. Those dives found Romano-British remains, and archaeology dominated the early dives. A training dive in 1946 is also described as recovering three human skulls, several other bones, and a nearly intact Romano-British pot, just upstream of the first chamber and the Witch. The argument was made that many skulls lay upstream of the Witch and were unlikely to have rolled upstream against the Axe, so they had not simply tumbled from the stalagmite. By 1956, eighteen human skulls had been documented, with other bones, pottery, and Roman coins. The ninth chamber was first entered on 24 April 1948 by Balcombe and Don Coase. From that advance base the tenth and eleventh chambers were found. The way on was too deep for pure oxygen in a closed-circuit rebreather. Gordon Marriott died on 9 April 1949 while returning from the ninth chamber, the first life the cave took. Keith Potter drowned in 1981 on a routine dive farther upstream.

In 1955 Bob Davies, swimming with fins and an aqualung, reached the bottom of the eleventh chamber at 15 metres, or 49 feet, in clear water and found the twelfth and thirteenth chambers. He lost the guideline and the other two divers and spent three hours trapped in the thirteenth before he got out. Opinion then turned against the short-duration aqualung and against swimming, in favour of longer closed-circuit sets and of walking the bottom. Between 1957 and 1960 John Buxton and Oliver Wells, on semi-closed nitrogen-oxygen rebreathers, reached the elbow of the sump upstream from the ninth chamber at 22 metres, or 72 feet, a place called The Slot. The way on was too deep for their mixture. After a six-year pause, open-circuit air, free swimming, and neoprene suits changed the style of diving. In May 1966 Dave Savage reached air in the eighteenth chamber. Chambers were named for the limit of each exploration and did not have to contain air. After the tangle of lines from the ninth chamber was sorted, John Parker reached the large dry inlet of the twentieth chamber and then followed the Axe upstream for 152 metres, or 499 feet, to a depth of 24 metres, or 79 feet, surfacing in the twenty-second, where the way seemed lost.

Climbing in the ninth chamber found an abandoned outlet that ended very near the surface, and a dry route downstream through the upper levels of the eighth, seventh, and sixth chambers as far as the fifth. Those discoveries let the show cave be extended into the ninth chamber and let divers start from there, skipping the dive out of the third. Colin Edmond and Martyn Farr found the way on from the twenty-second chamber in February 1976 and explored until the line ran out. A few days later Geoff Yeadon and Oliver Statham, in a move that caused some controversy, reached the twenty-third chamber after laying only another 9 metres, or 30 feet. Three short dives later they surfaced in the twenty-fourth, where Statham described the whole River Axe pouring down a passage 40 feet high by five feet wide and ending in a blue lake after 90 metres. Farr dived that lake a few days later for 90 metres, or 300 feet, to a depth of 18 metres, or 59 feet, and emerged in the twenty-fifth chamber, the Lake of Gloom, the farthest upstream air surface in the cave. From there the river rises out of a deep sump in which British cave-diving depth records were set: Martyn Farr to 45 metres, or 148 feet, in 1977; Rob Parker to 68 metres, or 223 feet, in 1985; and John Volanthen and Rick Stanton to 76 metres, or 249 feet, in 2004. They returned in 2005 and reached 90 metres, or 300 feet, a new British Isles depth record for cave diving. That record was later broken elsewhere, at Pollatoomary in Ireland, by Artur Kozłowski in 2008 and afterwards by Michal Marek. It was not broken by a deeper dive at Wookey. The 2015 tunnel into the twentieth chamber was then used to push a small passage to a sump that was dived through to Sting Corner in the twenty-fourth chamber. In 2020 a dry connection was made to the same place.

Gerry Cottle, Gerald Ward Cottle, born on 7 April 1945 in Carshalton and dead in hospital in Bath in January 2021 at the age of 75, after contracting COVID-19, became the owner who turned the show cave toward the circus. A description of the attraction written while he was alive calls him the present owner. His own life is recorded as ending in 2021, and no later owner is named here. He had run away to the Robert Brothers Circus in 1961 at sixteen, earning six pounds a week, and by 1968 he was a clown called Scats and a juggler billed as Gerry Melville. With Brian Austen he formed the Embassy Circus in July 1970. They parted in 1974, and Cottle ran his own big top until 2003, with three shows on the road by the middle of the 1970s. He presented the Moscow State Circus and the Chinese State Circus in Britain. A 1979 tour of Iran coincided with the Iranian Revolution. The company was not paid, went bankrupt, and left its hotel at midnight. He announced retirement in 1993. In 1995 he co-created the Circus of Horrors, which debuted at the Glastonbury Festival. By the end of 1993 he had a circus without animals, having sold his last elephant, after years in which the show had travelled with horses, zebras, elephants, lions, tigers, monkeys, and llamas. In 2003, refused planning permission to expand his quarters at Addlestone Moor, he auctioned much of the circus equipment and concentrated on Wookey Hole. He added a theatre, a circus museum, a hotel, and a circus school, where local young people learned circus skills and performed in the theatre and in his touring show Turbo Circus. In 2012 that show was billed as fifty acts in a hundred minutes, on a thirty-one-week tour.

In 2005 the museum reported that a Dalek prop had gone missing, with a ransom note and a detached plunger from people calling themselves the Guardians of the Planet Earth. The prop was later recovered from Glastonbury Tor. Cottle denied that the episode was a publicity stunt. On 1 August 2006 it was reported that Barney, a Doberman used as a security dog, had destroyed parts of a collection of teddy bears, including one said to have belonged to Elvis Presley and estimated at 40,000 pounds, or 75,000 US dollars. Cottle later admitted that he had invented the story and that the museum had never owned such a bear. In February 2009 he turned the Victorian bowling green beside the caves into a crazy-golf course without first obtaining planning permission. Commercial handmade paper stopped in February 2008 because he concluded there was no longer a market, and he sold most of the historic machinery. Visitors can still watch a short film of cotton being made into paper. Other attractions added around the cave include a dinosaur valley, a small museum of the cave and of cave diving, a theatre for circus shows, a house of mirrors, and penny arcades.

The cave has been used as a film and television location. The Doctor Who serial Revenge of the Cybermen was filmed there in 1975, with Tom Baker. The caves were used again in Doctor Who for The End of Time in 2009, including a scene in which the Doctor shares thoughts with the Ood, and they were used in Blake's 7 in 1978, in Robin of Sherwood in 1983, and in Masters of the Universe in 2026. The programme Most Haunted visited the caves and the mill, and the episode aired on 10 March 2009, the last transmitted in that series. In 2009 a new performer was chosen to play the witch. Carole Bohanan, in the role of Carla Calamity, was picked from more than 3,000 applicants.

The most recent archaeological recoveries from the cave itself, as distinct from other Mendip caves, come from divers. In January 2019, during line-laying training, divers recovered two vessels. One was complete and intact, a single-handled flagon of a late third-century to fourth-century form, broadly similar to New Forest grey-ware products. The other was an Oxford red-slipped colour-coat flask with a globular body, a tall narrow neck, and a plain rounded rim with a shallow groove below the lip, dated to the fourth century. The flagon came from between the first and third chambers, under a large rock against the right-hand wall. The flask came from the resurgence on a later dive. A piece of limestone with calcite, about 30 millimetres across, was lodged in the flagon's mouth and may have been placed there as a stopper. The sediment inside was waterborne material from the long submersion, though the flagon might once have held a liquid, and the sediment was kept. The vessels were unstratified, but they were judged highly likely to have come from disturbed late Roman burials in the fourth chamber, and typologically they fit the first half of the fourth century, in line with other cemetery assemblages of that time. A diver's account of 2019 describes an intact Roman pot found on a training dive with his son, just downstream of the third chamber, later dated to the third or fourth century, and placed in the museum. That account matches the season and the place of the flagon.

On 4 October 2020 a flood raised the water to a recorded 1.4 metres, or 4.6 feet, above average and tore at the banks inside and outside the cave. Chris Binding, walking the damage, found a human bone on the river bank in the third chamber and asked Michael Thomas and his son Robert to dive. Over later dives, with help from others, they collected human bones that had washed out of the fourth-chamber burial ground and lost their original positions, including two skulls, one of them just upstream of the Witch. The bones were kept in cave water until Marta Kobylinska identified them. The collection went on display in the cave museum on 17 May 2021. The remains were given a possible range anywhere from the Iron Age, stated as 800 BCE, to the Roman period, stated as 400 CE. A caption on one skull fragment narrows that piece to between 800 and 400 BCE. Those are estimated ranges in the divers' report, not a new laboratory date published for each bone. The bones are additional material from the same Roman and Iron Age burial tradition already known in the cave, displaced by floodwater. They are not a separate prehistoric cemetery, and they are not the Ice Age animals of the Hyaena Den or of Badger Hole.

What the place was, then, changes with the chamber. The side caves held hyenas, and later Neanderthals and early modern hunters, through the Stone Age of the Mendips. The main cave's published human use is Iron Age and Romano-British: a place of occupation, of cooking and craft, perhaps of seasonal workshop and of ritual deposition, and certainly, in the fourth chamber, of burial. The stake in the Roman period was ordinary life on the edge of a conquered province, from a generation or more after the invasion of 47 until the late fourth century, with a possible empty middle in the third. What changed afterward was the use of the water, first for a mill recorded in 1086 and then for a paper works from about 1610, and the use of the dark itself, first by the divers of 1935 and then by a show cave whose legend of a witch was fitted to the bones of a man. Excavation has taken the deposits out of the public chambers. The river, the sumps, and the side caves still hold what has not been brought to the surface.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/wookey-hole-caves