The Hole in the Vault
Walking along Seven Falls off Vault Road, next to the entrance to the tunnel.
Between Kingston and Margaretsville, on the North Mountain, is a cave. Because of the smooth round appearance of the entrance, some believe it was carved by man, perhaps even the nefarious pirate Captain Kidd looking for another place to bury his pillaged treasures. Squeezing inside the entrance, one would find a gallery with a very abrupt descent. This tunnel was so deep that some say if you dropped a stone in, you wouldn’t hear it hit the ground. Others have said that they tried this and they did hear something - a splash. Does this mean that a pool of water lies at the bottom of the hole?
One legend says that someone took blocks of dry wood and painted them in bright colours. He marked on them the date and the place, and then dropped them into the cave. A few days later, one of these blocks was found floating in the Bay of Fundy - perhaps indicating that this was a tidal pool that extended all the way to the depths of North Mountain.
In 1892, one of the “Fathers of Canadian Poetry” Sir Charles G.D. Roberts wrote about this “hole in the vault” by what is now the abandoned section of Vault Road in Annapolis County. He had moved to Nova Scotia from New Brunswick in 1885 to become professor of English, Economics and French at King’s College in Windsor. Two of his students who spent their summers in the Annapolis Valley told Roberts more about this hole and the mysteries surrounding it, and he recorded the story in a newspaper article in “The Youth’s Companion.”
An illustration from “The Youth’s Companion” article.
Wanting to explore the depths of the cave themselves, the two men found an energetic young local named Joe Gillespie from Melvern Square to be their guide. Together the three took their horses up the North Mountain, bushwhacking when the path got too overgrown. When they finally reached the hole, they began their descent guided by lamps.
Once in the gallery of the cave, the men noticed the deep tunnel before them and dropped stones down into the abyss. Hearing no splash, one of the men suggested it was due to the tide being out. They had brought with them a long spruce pole, which they now took out and tied a cord to one end. The other end was tied to a miner’s lamp, which they lowered slowly into the hole. Open flames in mines are dangerous as they can ignite coal dust or gases, creating explosions. Miner’s safety lamps were designed by the 1800’s to enclose the flame, preventing it from igniting the surrounding atmosphere, while still having the ability of warning about dangerous gases by extinguishing. When they lowered the miner’s lamp and saw that the light did not go out, they concluded that the air was clear in the shaft, and safe for someone to go down.
One of the brave adventurers volunteered, securing a rope around his waist as a harness. In one hand he held onto the cord with the lamp so that it hung below him as he was lowered. If the lamp went out, he would having warning that there was no air or there were unbreathable gases below. The group decided on a form of communication where 1 jerk on the rope meant to stop lowering, 2 meant to continue, and 3 meant to pull him up.
An illustration from “The Youth’s Companion.”
The man descended for 30 to 40 feet. Slowly the walls of the hole began to change in texture and appearance with water oozing out of crevices, the rock glistening wet. Once he reached milky veins of quartz, he yanked on the rope to signal he wanted to stop and used a pick to chip off rock, pocketing some amethysts. On he continued another 60 feet. Here the direction of the tunnel changed and he could almost walk along before it began to descend again.
Around 90 feet deep, the rock was loose, crumbling around him. Just then a large rock above him dislodged and fell past his shoulder, knocking into the lamp, carrying it away into the darkness below. Horrified by the close call, he realized that with the deteriorating walls this would likely happen again. He pulled on the rope 3 times, and he was slowly pulled back up, up until he reached that part where the direction of the tunnel changed and the movement stopped. The rope was stuck. There was a mass of rock that had closed in above him.
He imagined someone descending to rescue him and the mass dislodging and falling on top of him, sending him down into the depths after his lamp. He thought in horror, “perhaps, someday, my dead body would be washed out, through strange sinks and arteries of that under-world, to the open tides of the Bay”.
Pulling himself up the rope to the blockage, he used his pick to try to clear the route. After 30 minutes of vigorous clawing, he cleared a path. He pulled again on the rope and finally he was heading up. This time much slower. The adventurer reckoned that one of the men had likely left to get help. Finally he emerged from the hole, his friend leaping over to hug him with relief. When the rescue party arrived they found the two men happily eating their lunch outside the cave. Some of the farmers admonished the boys with “I told you so’s” and then cut down surrounding trees to dump into the hole, hiding the entrance to avoid future misadventures.
A man follows the path up the hill beside Seven Falls, next to the entrance of the hole in the vault.
As fascinating as this story is, I don’t condone or encourage exploring the cave or trying it find it on your own. Falling into the bowels of a mountain, and maybe ending up in the Bay of Fundy, wouldn’t be the best way to go in my opinion.
That being said, if you do want to explore the area, head up Vault Road from Spa Springs Road, until it becomes less maintained and park near the quarry. If you keep walking up the road you’ll hear the roar of a waterfall with a little path along the left side of the brook. Follow it upstream to see Seven Falls in its glory, a falls that just keeps going the higher you hike up the mountain. Once you reach Dodge Road, you can follow it to the right until it meets Vault again, and you walk downhill to complete the loop. These would have been the roads that those 1892 explorers came up on their horses in search of their adventure.
If you’re interested in reading Charles GD Robert’s entire article about the 1892 journey, it can be found here: http://www.dermott.ca/nstour/vault/vault.html .
