Author: Sylvia P Beamon
Publisher: The Temple Publications
Price: £16.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780955740008

Once available only in an expensive edit­ion, this re-issue is timely in light of the recent finding that the unique carvings underneath Royston high street are slowly being eaten by chalk-eating worms.

This investigation attempts to answer the question: Was the bell-shaped chamber really decorated and used by artistically-inclined Knights Templars, presumably incognito during their suppress­ion? Having amassed just about every primary source to show the presence of the Order in the locality, definite answers remain elus­ive. Sylvia Beamon’s hypothesis that the knights made the cave’s cult symbols, while relentlessly pursued via churches and pipe rolls, fails to gel, making this a work of two halves, where the sum feels like two uncomplementary jigsaw pieces being thumped to fit together.

Given the huge effort put into this study, with many illustrat­ions and a wealth of appendices and material on other carved mediæval sites, it is surprising to find the possibility of the cave’s Roman origin dismissed in a few lines since it shows no signs of being a columbarium. Given the cave’s positioning underneath the crossing point of two major Roman roads (instigating my suggestion in FT259 that the cave was created or used by Roman contemporaries for Pythagorean purposes), this must be a relevant branch of enquiry. It does not exclude the possibility of the cave being later used by Templars – nor, for that matter, anyone else – up to its 18th-century rediscovery. But all we really know is that the carvers drew a profusion of symbols, from the Sheela-Na-Gig and the Celtic-style horse (hardly an indication of Templars) to all the saints and martyrs, some of them possibly Templar martyrs.

In her relentless focus on uniting the Templars and the carvings, Beamon loses sight of the strange fact of the chamber’s very existence, and the implications of the symbols, in what is otherwise a very thorough, if sometimes heavy-going and ultimately hedged, investigation. While failing to splice the cave with the Templars convincingly, this still has to be the definitive work on the history of the cave’s discovery and investigation, as well as the Templar presence in the Royston-Baldock district, and should be cited in any serious evaluation of one of the great mysteries of subterranean art.