Bacon Hole Cave (SS 5604/8682)

This large sea-facing cave is reached from a well defined but steep path from the headland to the west of Deep Slade. Its descriptive name is usually recorded as deriving from a discovery made by a Professor Sollas and Abbe Breuil during their 1912 excavation of the cave. However, the cave was mention under the title Bacon Hole in the annual report of the Swansea Literary and Scientific Society by Sterlin Benson in 1852, so there is quite a mystery as to the true origin of the term.

Following an eight metre long by three metre wide tunnel leading from the caves large forty metre long main chamber, Sollas and Breuil found a series of ten horizontal redbands covered with a thin translucent covering of stalagmite. Believing these marks (which resembled large streaks of bacon - hence the cave's name) to be the only evidence in the UK of Palaeolithic cave paintings, Bacon Hole suddenly became the scene of great excitement and raging controversy.

In his definitive book on Gower caves, Tony Oldman recounts how local villagers were always disparaging of Sollas and Breuil's interpretation of these red 'stains.' Apparently, they believed the red marks were attributable to more recent 'artistic endeavours.'

Eighteen years earlier, the Althea - a Norwegian barque - was wrecked below Bacon Hole and the salvage team in charge of the ship used the cave to store items from the wreck as they worked on it. Amongst the items unloaded from the Althea and brought into the cave were large cans of red ocean-faring paint. Johnny Bale, a salvager from Oystermouth, was thus credited by locals with daubing these red streaks on the cave's walls and they believed that the stalagmite that covered the marks could easily have formed in less than two decades.

Although this local theory was soon disproved, so, unfortunately, was the assertion that Britain finally had its own set of genuine cave paintings to celebrate. The red stains, it is now acknowledged, are, alas, of natural origin.

Like most of Gower's coastal caves, access is not easy and the best approach is made by following the very steep slope that descends from the headland to the west of Deep Slade. There, a twenty metre by seven metre cave entrance will be reached. This leads to the cavernous main chamber where an earlier excavation in 1850 by Colonel Wood discovered remains of numerous Pleistocene animals including that of the straight-nosed elephant and narrow-nosed rhinoceros. Later explorations have also found early Iron-Age potter.

The cave is also believed to have been occupied by humans during the Roman occupation, the Dark Ages and throughout Medieval times.