Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe — Themes and Context

Comparative Beginnings

The preface sets up a transatlantic contrast. Baring-Gould summarizes American discoveries by Powell, Jackson, and Holmes, noting the “tremendous cañons of red sandstone” and the “inaccessible positions” of Pueblo dwellings. He then shifts to Europe, where cliff castles and cave homes are less famous but equally ingenious. The author’s diction is vivid: ledges are “perched,” cliffs are “riddled,” and the Maqui live on “sandstone tables” in a “sandy ocean.” This opening establishes that the book will not merely catalog sites but will explore why people chose such precarious homes.

The Rhetoric of Ruin

Baring-Gould’s prose turns forceful when discussing iconoclasm. He describes Calvin’s followers as driving “piles by the strokes of his genius” into mud, and their legacy as “wrecked churches, mutilated monuments, broken glass, and shattered sculpture.” The passage on Vendôme’s west front—a “lace-work of beautiful sculpture” of “trailing roses and vines, birds and reptiles”—is deliberately specific. The author does not merely condemn destruction; he makes the reader see what was lost. His metaphor of the Church as a hulk grounded on quicksands, with reformers casting “all its precious lading into the sea,” reveals a writer who values both material and spiritual heritage.

Geology and Human Habitation

The description of La Rochebrune shows Baring-Gould’s eye for landscape. He notes the “chain of very fine chalk cliffs,” the “talus overgrown with box and juniper,” and the cave opening “by the roadside, immediately under this rock.” The setting is precise: the road runs between the cliff and the river Dronne, with a lateral valley breaking the rock face. This attention to topography suggests that the author sees caves not as isolated curiosities but as elements of a lived environment. The phrase “curious and puzzling” signals that some sites resist easy explanation, a humility that recurs throughout the text.

Voice and Judgment

Baring-Gould’s authorial voice is distinctive: learned, opinionated, and occasionally wry. He calls pluralist abbots “ecclesiastical hippopotami” and compares the Pope to “Dame Partington with her mop.” Yet his judgments are grounded in evidence. The passage on Calvin’s Institute argues that it succeeded because “earnest and devout souls were troubled” by a Christianity “so in name but had little Christianity in its practice.” The author does not hide his sympathies, but he supports them with specific examples—the cathedrals of Montauban, Périgueux, and Orléans blown up with gunpowder, Beza rolling barrels under the piers of Orleans. This combination of polemic and fact gives the book its character.

Readers should attend to Baring-Gould’s method: he moves from American cliff dwellings to European cave homes, from prehistoric to medieval, from description to polemic. His digressions—on Calvinism, on the beauty of ruined sculpture—are not asides but integral to his argument that human dwelling places reflect belief and society. The book rewards those who read slowly, noting how the author’s language shapes his material.

I remember shelving Baring-Gould’s book, thinking how those stone hollows held lives as quietly as pages hold ink. Not long after, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East — Story, Setting & Ideas came to mind—same strange patience, same sense of rooms shaped by need. Two different maps, yet both drawn by the same weary hand. I liked that.