To step inside them is to enter another world.

At least that was the idea.

It's located underground beneath a hill in West Wickham just outside of London, England,

and by it, I mean the caves.

You enter them through a rather imposing set of iron gates that are situated beneath

the ruins of what looks like an old church.

There had always been a natural cave there, but in the 1750s, a local man named Francis

paid a bunch of out-of-work farmers to widen and deepen it, using the chalk debris as road

material all throughout town.

What they created was a system of hand-cut rooms and passageways that looked like something

out of a medieval fantasy movie, and each chamber has a name, the entrance hall, the

triangle, the miners' cave, the

stewards chamber.

You get the idea.

There's even one called Franklin's Cave, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Nearly a quarter of a mile down the path, rumored to be directly below the church that

stands at the top of the hill, is the final destination, a place called the Inner Temple.

You can walk right up to that room today, but back in the 1750s, it was actually cut off

from the rest of the rooms by an underground river that was named, appropriately I think,

the River Sticks.

All of this, by the way, was crafted so that Francis had a place to hold meetings of

a rather unusual social gathering.

...