The Doward Caves, Herefordshire rate highly among my top ten favourite places on planet Earth. They may not be as exciting or filled with cave art as are those at Chauvet-Pont D' Arc but there is just something about them which holds a fascination for me, almost to the point that I feel loath to pay them too much attention on this web site for fear of an influx of visitors. The fact that they are not easy to get to and impossible to drive to does however comfort me somewhat.

King Arthur's Cave is the most well known of the caverns. It was occupied by man during the upper Palaeolithic and possibly prior to that, though it is currently occupied by bats, spiders and other small furry animals. I have taken literally hundreds of photographs both in and outside of King Arthur's Cave, day and night and one particular rock formation just inside the entrance, whenever photographed using flash, to my eye always seems to look like the figure of a knight with long hair and a beard. Without wishing to label myself with the image of 'train spotter,' I wonder if this may have been seen in the dim and distant past, hence the cave's name. Does anybody know the origin of the name? I would be pleased to hear from you if you do.

Author's note:

Most times I visit the area of the caves nothing seems out of the ordinary and I explore the woods looking for deer and photograph rock formations above and below ground, sometimes alone and at other times with Tina or my children. On the odd occasion however the woods have an 'eerie' feel to them.

At the beginning of October 2002 I was there with my partner, Tina and my son, Chris but had wandered off alone to explore an area by myself. On this particular day I felt we were not alone. There had been a strangely strong smell of incense in the woods, though I put this down to two other people I had seen on my travels. I could hear Chris and Tina speaking to one another, so I was not far from them when I found myself on a tree lined cliff edge with a sheer drop of several hundred feet to the River Wye below. It was getting dark and I wanted to take a photograph to record my location, so I used flash.

As I took the photo, I saw two bright objects in the trees which quickly lit up and then vanished. There was no way that they were man made as there was nowhere in the trees for anybody, other than those with the ability to hover dangerously in mid air above a cliff face, to hide. Almost immediately after my taking the photograph, Chris called me and I went off to find him, forgetting about the bright objects almost immediately. It was only on my returning home and printing the photographs that I realized I had caught one of the phenomena on the image.

There were definitely two of them, a split second apart yet the camera had only captured one. I put this down to the shutter speed being faster than the duration of the flash. The resulting image is shown above. I realize it looks like a camera apparition but I know it is not as I saw it, plus the other one with my own eyes. The camera is not a cheap digital of the type which is known not to fill all pixels of the image when using flash - it's an extremely high, professional quality SLR type. Looking at the right hand of the two images above, which is not an enlargement but a crop from the original and is actually reduced from the original image size, the trees are sharply in focus yet the object appears to be moving. I am totally baffled as to what it is.

I would like to stress here that I may be a little eccentric in appearance and deed, and I may have an odd sense of humour plus a cynical outlook on life which manifests itself occasionally, but I am not a ghost hunting, flying saucer spotting believer in crop circles or ghostly orbs!

[An pdate on the caves 2004]

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