Royston Cave

A carved chalk chamber under a market square, and nobody knows who made it

In August 1742 a workman digging footings for a bench in Royston’s Butter Market hit a buried millstone, dug round it, and found a shaft into the chalk. Below was a bell-shaped chamber 8 metres high and 5 across, more than half full of earth. The town decided it held treasure. Cartloads of soil came out and gave up only a few old bones and bits of pottery, and uncovered the walls: carved all round with medieval figures, St Catherine with her wheel, St Lawrence with his gridiron, St Christopher, the Crucifixion and a sheela na gig, with holes beneath some of them that probably held candles. Nobody knows who cut it or why. The famous answer is the Knights Templar, and it does not hold up well: the armoured figures wear full plate a century after the order was gone, and Pevsner dated the carving to between the 14th and 17th centuries. Other theories run from a Freemasons’ lodge to a monks’ storehouse, a private chapel or a hermit’s cell at the crossing of Ermine Street and the Icknield Way.