An Ancient American Road Trip

Following a few unsuccessful attempts to visit the cave of Lascaux, I am at last getting my 40 minutes of Ice Age glory. Lascaux is after all to art what La Scala is to opera, or Glastonbury to summer music festivals.

Our group of five is met at a gate on the edge of a hill-side car-park, just outside the town of Montignac in the south west of France. We are led in silence to what seems like a top security portal to some underground WW2 bunker. A couple is holding hands, they look at each other and exchange an excited giggle.

Otherwise, the aura of reverence that cloaks our group is so obviously at odds with the unremarkable entrance we are contemplating. I try to imagine the thousands of visitors that once flocked to this very spot. Since the cave was closed in 1963 access has been restricted to only a handful of visitors each week.

We are that handful, this is our week.

Our guide is explaining the procedure, how we will pass through three successive chambers before entering the cave itself. These will help our body acclimatise to the cave's 13°C and our eyes adjust to the darkness. More crucially, the sealed chambers prevent the air outside, teaming with destructive fungal spores, from following us in and contaminating the heavily controlled environment within the cave.

Actually moving from one chamber to the next turns out to be not so prosaic.

Each soulless room is one less hurdle before we finally feast our eyes on the 17,000 year old paintings. The five metre-long bulls, the graceful stags, the rutting bison, the very same prehistoric images discovered in 1940 that changed the history of art. Our prior familiarity with them does nothing to diminish the obvious impact they have on each of us today.

Looking … no ... staring at the majestic images I think of a friend, a tough Indiana Jones type of archaeologist, whose eyes welled up when he stood where I am standing now. His 40 minutes passed in a watery blur.

Sadly those weekly slots are no more. Continued preservation problems have forced the closure of the cave to all but a few conservationists. Indefinitely.

While scientists debate whether or not there should be human access to the Ice Age caves in France and Spain, go and see as many as you can before they are all closed. At very least, visit Lascaux’s nearby replica. The accuracy of the reconstructed cave and reproduced imagery is measured in millimetres. The experience? Well, that is just as powerful with its own sense of drama.