Reigate Surrey hotels:

Barons Cave is one of Britain's oldest show caves and is part of a now lost Norman castle. It is one of Reigate's oldest surviving medieval features. Nobody knows how exactly old The Barons' Cave is. The oldest reference to it dates from 1586 when Camden describes "an extraordinary passage with a vaulted roof hewn with great labour out of the soft stone." Doors and windows with a similar profile to the cave passages were being built from about 1200 onwards, but we must be careful before drawing any conclusions from this. Nobody is really sure why the cave was dug. It has been made with great care - this can be seen in the way that the roof is so uniform and smooth. Where sand diggers have been at work, the walls are much rougher. Tunnel Road Cave is part of an enormous system of sand caverns which once existed in Reigate. They were used and equipped as a civil defence centre during World War II.