Long before cave surveying gave it an actual measured depth of around 55 metres, Eldon Hole had a reputation as a bottomless pit, a genuine gateway to the underworld set into the moorland above Peak Forest. It was one of the sites recorded by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1636 work on the wonders of the Peak, a list of the district's most marvellous and unsettling natural features, and it kept its nickname of the Devil's Bolt Hole well into more sceptical centuries.
The hole's central legend concerns an attempt to actually find out how deep it went. According to the story, the Earl of Leicester, visiting the district in the sixteenth century, persuaded a local man to be lowered into the shaft on a rope to test its true depth. When he was hauled back up he was unresponsive, and he died a short time afterwards without ever properly explaining what he had seen. The obvious reading at the time, and the one the story has kept, was that he had come face to face with the Devil and died of the shock.
Other folklore attached to the hole is looser but consistent in tone: that it was home not just to the Devil but to goblins, that highwaymen used it as a convenient place to dispose of robbery victims, and, in a much lighter register, that a goose chased into the hole by pursuers reappeared several days later flying out of Peak Cavern in Castleton, several miles off, having apparently found its way through some underground connection between the two. None of this can be checked against any real record, and the goose story in particular reads as a piece of tall-tale humour rather than a genuine belief, but the underlying reputation of the hole as a place best not gone near without good reason has clearly outlasted the specific tales.
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