As A Child,

we spent many holidays in the Margate/Westgate area on the Kent coast,

but one place we had never heard of or indeed visited was the Shell Grotto, contemporary accounts vary as to why and how the grotto was made, but the common theme is that a spade was lost into a void when a cap-stone was disturbed in 1835, in order to retrieve the tool a small boy named Joshua, the young son of James Newlove, was lowered through the narrow hole on a length of rope and the grotto was discovered,

Newlove was the schoolmaster of the nearby boys’ school, Dane House School, shortly after the discovery the land above the site was purchased by Newlove who then opened the grotto to the public in 1837 after installing a horizontal entrance into the altar chamber and lighting the tunnels with naked gas flame lighting,

the entrance to the grotto is through a 70-foot underground winding passageway, the grotto is painstakingly decorated with around 4.6 million seashells,

over the years many have speculated on the exact history of the grotto, it may have been associated with the Knights Templar with a construction date of mid 12th century, or even an Altar Chamber being an early temple for Masonic rituals, almost all of the theories of the Grotto’s origins are based on there being ‘hidden wisdom’ in the layouts of the shells, for a fuller insight into the history of this grotto have a look here at a 14 page paper by R. F. Legear MAAIS, AIFA,

so maybe next time Diana and myself are in the UK we might take a trip to see if we can see any hidden meanings in the shells.