The cave beneath Peveril Castle in Castleton has the largest natural entrance of any cave in Britain, a cathedral-sized opening that made it usable as a place to actually live and work rather than just visit. For generations a community of rope-makers set up their walks inside the cave mouth itself, twisting hemp in the shelter of the entrance chamber, making Peak Cavern home to what is often called Britain's last genuine troglodyte settlement, right up into the twentieth century.
The cave's older and blunter name, the Devil's Arse, comes from a straightforwardly physical cause: after heavy rain, floodwater draining out through the cave's inner passages produces a loud, unmistakably flatulent noise, amplified by the scale of the entrance chamber. Rather than embarrassing early visitors into silence, the noise became the cave's defining folk feature, giving rise to a name that stuck through Tudor visits, Georgian tourism and well into the modern era, alongside looser stories that the cave's deeper, unlit sections were the haunt of bandits preying on travellers through the Hope Valley.
For much of the twentieth century the attraction traded under the more polite Peak Cavern, but its operators have since reverted officially to the old name, judging correctly that the Devil's Arse is a better draw for visitors than a description of the cave's geology. Little of this is paranormal in the ghost-story sense, but it belongs here as a genuine piece of Peak District folklore, a place-name legend explained by a real natural process rather than an invented one.
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