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Updated: May 16, 2025
Paxhill, in Sussex, the ancient seat of the Bordes, has a priest's hole behind a window-shutter, and it is large enough to hold several persons; there is another large hiding-hole in the ceiling of a room on the ground floor, which is reached through a trap-door in the floor above. It is provided with a stone bench.
About an hour after they were gone, I happened to go up to father's bedroom to fetch something, and when I came out again I noticed an odd sound at first I couldn't think where it came from. It was like someone breathing very heavily, someone asleep. I stood quite still, and soon I found that it came from the priests' hiding-hole you know it, you have seen it.
Now, I know such a hiding-hole in Purbeck, which they call Joseph's Pit, and thither we must go; but it will take all the day to get there, for it is seven miles off, and I am older than I was, and thou too heavy a babe to carry over lightly. I did not know the pit he spoke of, but was glad to hear of some place, however far off, where I could lie still and get ease from the pain.
Sitting along the floor, he was bent almost double, so that we could not see his face. "Hello!" Sir Roland called out, "who are you? What are you doing there?" But the figure didn't move. At one end of the hiding-hole a ladder was nailed vertically. The feet of the man touched its lowest rung. Turning, Sir Roland began carefully to descend.
And taking Adrian's arm, he led the way, amid the summer throng of delicate scents and sounds, under the opulent old trees, over the gold-green velvet of the turf, on which leaves and branches were stencilled by the sun, as in an elaborate design for lace, towards a house that was rather famous in the neighbourhood I was on the point of saying for its beauty: but are things ever famous in English neighbourhoods for their mere beauty? for its quaintness, and in some measure too, perhaps, for its history: Craford Old Manor, a red-brick Tudor house, low, and, in the rectangular style of such houses, rambling; with a paved inner court, and countless tall chimneys, like minarets; with a secret chapel and a priests' "hiding-hole," for the Crafords were one of those old Catholic families whose boast it is that they "have never lost the Faith"; with a walled formal garden, and a terrace, and a sun-dial; with close-cropped bordures of box, and yews clipped to fantastic patterns: the house so placed withal, that, while its north front faced the park, its south front, ivy-covered, looked over a bright lawn and bright parterres of flowers, down upon the long green levels of Rowland Marshes, and away to the blue sea beyond, the blue sea, the white cliffs, the yellow sands.
Don Luis propped himself against the back of his hiding-hole to avoid as far as possible the glare of the lanterns, of which he was beginning to see the gleams. And an amazing thing happened: the stone against which he was pushing toppled over slowly, as though moving on a pivot, and he fell backward into a second cavity situated behind it.
And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside?
He also wanted to know if there were a priests' hiding-hole in Eldon Hall, as was the case in so many of the large country mansions built about the same period, and, if so, its exact whereabouts in the house. As Jack Osborne said this, my thoughts flashed away to Berkshire, to Holt Manor, to the dark, depressing hiding-hole there that I had peered down into more than once.
Half an hour later the man found in the hiding-hole lay upon a bed in one of the spare rooms. Though not dead, he had, when discovered, been in the last stage of exhaustion. The doctor telephoned for had at once discovered that what we already suspected was true the man's left ankle was very badly sprained. It must, he said, have been sprained ten or twelve days previously.
A discovery of this nature was made in 1785 in a hidden vault at the foot of a stone staircase at Brandon Hall, Suffolk. Kingerby Hall, Lincolnshire, has a ghostly tradition of an unfortunate occupant of the hiding-hole near a fireplace being intentionally fastened in so that he was stifled with the heat and smoke; the skeleton was found years afterwards in this horrible death-chamber.
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