- Tucked away in the picturesque little village of Knaresborough in Yorkshire,
is Mother Shipton's Cave.
And the publicity claims that it is "England's oldest still-surviving tourist attraction".
Good luck fact-checking that,
but I can't find anything else
that's been charging an admission fee for nearly 400 years.
To be fair, good luck fact-checking anything in this story.
It's likely that there was a woman called Mother Shipton
who lived about 500 years ago, but after that,
actual certified references are shaky at best.
She's said these days to have been a witch and a prophet
who lived in a cave with a pool shaped like a skull
that turned things to stone.
- We all grow up in this area hearing about Mother Shipton,
and so we grew up with her prophecies.
We're talking about the year 1488.
There was a young lady called Agatha Sontheil,
was cast out of the town of Knaresborough
at the age of 15 because she was having a baby.
So, she came to these woods
and, in the cave, gave birth to a baby girl
called Ursula Sontheil.
She was born, it is said, with a hunched back,
but she was also a very, very clever young lady.
At the age of five,
she went to the medieval equivalent of school.
She left school at 15.
At the age of 20, she got married to a carpenter
by the name of Tobias Shipton.
But by this time, she was having visions about the future
and news of her prophecies was starting to spread.
There was a lot of superstition about her.
She was already learning to hate authority,
and some people thought she was a witch.
There was a bridge at the entrance to the park.
Now, Mother Shipton said,
"When the High Bridge in Knaresborough has fallen thrice,
"the end of the world is nigh."
Not to get you worried, it has been down twice already.
But there are more roadworks across that bridge
than anywhere else in this area
and I can assure you it's very solid.
- We'll never know which of the many, many stories
about Mother Shipton's life were actually true.
She's a folk legend.
And unless the laws of physics have changed in the last few centuries,
she couldn't actually see the future.
But the pool that turns objects to stone?
Well, that is real.
And at some point a few centuries ago,
some enterprising local decided to start charging admission.
- This park used to belong to the Royal Family.
It was bought by Sir Charles Slingsby from King Charles I in 1630.
Sir Charles was a canny Yorkshire man
who decided a pretty penny could be made from this place,
hence guided tours commenced here in that year.
Not me, I have to add!
Before he bought this, it had a very, very bad press.
People, being superstitious,
would find animal skeletons, leaves turning to stone,
and they actually thought people would turn to stone.
He soon realised he was onto a good thing here.
The waters consist of iron, zinc, magnesium, aluminium, calcium carbonate.
There's a stream which is underground, and it comes to the surface
just before you come down to this well.
It comes to the surface, it goes over the wellhead,
and when it drops down, it'll turn anything to stone
because of the various chemicals it's picked up.
And it became known as a health cure.
People would bathe in the water and drink the water.
It it supposed to cure rheumatism.
It's not recommendable today with modern health and safety(!)
- This isn't true petrification.
The material isn't being replaced with stone.
But at the risk of making some chemists angry at me,
I think it's close enough.
The water here is so rich in minerals, carbonates and sulphates,
that it acts like stalactites forming in a cave
or limescale building up on your plumbing.
The teddy bears, the hats, the whatever's in here,
it's steadily being coated in minerals over and over and over again.
And if it's porous, it becomes solid enough that,
yeah, it turns to stone.
Chemically, maybe not.
Linguistically? Sure, I'll take that.
- Now, with regard to the objects that you see up there,
it's got to be anything porous.
The smaller the object is, the shorter time it takes.
A teddy would take about three months.
Anything bigger would take six months to a year.
It does freeze in winter.
Icicles come right down to the floor, and it's quite spectacular.
It's been flowing since the ice age.
The other remarkable thing about the water is it flows at the same rate all the time:
700 gallons an hour. It never varies, drought or flood.
It's again one of the wonders of the well: it never dries up.
- Mother Shipton's Cave is still a tourist attraction.
They still charge money to do the nice long walk through the park
and then come and marvel at the pool that turns things to stone.
But before theme parks,
before American roadside attractions,
before seaside tourist traps,
there was a cave, a good story,
and someone who wanted to make some money off it.
And they still sell the teddy bears in the gift shop.