Photographs taken 2004
Daniel Gumb's is a curious house. It is perched on the side of the old Cheesewring Quarry. What is more interesting, is that it is no longer strictly as it was when the fellow lived in it - and live in it he did. Its original position was out in - what is now - mid-air. It was originally where the quarry wasn't, so-to-speak, when it was built, but when the quarry was blasted out in the nineteenth century, the quarrymen fortunately "moved" the structure of the cave to preserve it for posterity. The cave, come house, was man-made by Mr.Gumb in around 1735, and was in its day a lot more extensive, and extended to three rooms and thirty feet in length, under a large stone slab. His wife (he had in his time three of them) and nine children - that's right, nine - lived with him. He was a stone cutter of the moor, and as such, had all the skills necessary to build the house, and consequently owed no-one any rent. He was also a very skilled mathematician, and studied the theory of mathematics for himself, when not cutting stones.
Daniel Gumb's Cave
Daniel Gumb's Cave in its present setting
It even has a guttering system!
Daniel Gumb was a mathematician who loved to study, writes Wilkie Collins in Rambles Beyond Railways:
"...the rock where he used to sit on calm
summer evenings, absorbed over his tattered copy of Euclid. A
geometrical 'puzzle',
traced by his hand, still appears on the
stone..."
This geometrical puzzle, carved in stone, is actually the proof of Pythagoras's Theorem.
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