When Oliver Bowerman was just five years old, his parents told him they were moving the family to a cave.
They weren’t quite living out a Neanderthal re-enactment fantasy – they had actually bought a potential tourist honeypot in the Yorkshire Dales.
The Bowermans had responded to a newspaper advert for a new owner for Stump Cross Caverns, near Pateley Bridge, that was described as a “once in a generation” opportunity.
Oliver at first thought he would be starting a new life in the Stone Age, but 22 years later he is about to take on the management of the caverns himself.
“I remember first coming down, being absolutely terrified and coming straight back up,” Oliver said.
“I saw the wolverine picture on the surface and I thought it was going to be in the cave and eat us.”
He soon grew to love the cavern system, which dates back 350 million years, and by the age of seven he had explored it more than 100 times.
“It was surprisingly normal. You didn’t think much of the cave because you became so used to it,” he said.
Growing up, Oliver said his friends thought it was “cool” and he even filmed a music video with his band in the caves.
“I think it was more when I went to university, you got people asking what your parents do,” he added.
“When I said ‘oh, we have a cave’, the look on people’s faces was quite interesting.”
After graduating with a psychology degree, Oliver started to help run the business alongside his mother, Lisa Bowerman.
She recalled being on holiday when she revealed to her three children they were buying a tourist attraction with a cottage attached.
“They didn’t even know what a cave was.”
More than 20 years later, Lisa said she is proud of the business they have built and is ready to pass the baton to Oliver.
“To be in a position to hand it over to somebody with such an amazing business brain and such a vision for the future, it’s quite exciting,” she said.
“I still boss him about, I am his mother at the end of the day, but we work really well together.”
Lisa will still be involved with the creative and education side of the business but Oliver will lead on the business decisions.
The cave system, where a complete reindeer fossil was later found, was first discovered by lead miners in the 19th Century. The landowners sold the site in 1926 to Septimus Wray, a pleasure garden entrepreneur who began opening the caverns to visitors. They remained in the ownership of his descendants until 2003, when the Bowermans bought the business.
Oliver’s new vision for Stump Cross Caverns includes opening up a new section of cave, previously only seen by potholers, to the public.
“It’s incredibly exciting because we can get people to see what we’ve seen,” Oliver said.
“We get the chance to actually peer behind the curtain and see these amazing caverns, but it’s a massive undertaking because there’s a lot of engineering that is going to be involved.”
Over the next two years, starting in January, a team will excavate the cavern by removing rock and soil.
“I was a bit sceptical and thinking about the workload and how it was going to be managed,” Lisa said.
“But it is just amazing. He’s got it all sorted and we can’t wait for the future.”
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