The existence of caves in the Buckfastleigh district had already been known for at least two centuries. Dean Jerermiah Mills, in his private survey, 1780, recorded that "In Mr. Furnese's quarry .... are a great many stalactites and stalagmites, of a beautiful kind of alabaster, the rock being full of small cavities in which they are found, tho' none of them go far under ground," Polwhele, in his History of Devonshire, 1791, probably referred to one of the caves in Higher Kiln Quarry, since destroyed, when he wrote "...round the abbey being one continued lime-rock, which is worked at many places to a depth, height and extent surprising and forming a vast cavern, at once terrific and beautiful, which proves an inexhaustible fund of gain to the owner.& quot;
During the early part of the Nineteenth Century Higher Kiln Quarry was visited by the Revd. J. MacEnery, one of the early excavators of Kent's Cavern,who was searching for remains of fossil mammals, but his quest, proved unsuccessful. In 1859 William Pengelly visited the nearby Baker's Pit Cave, which had been opened by quarrying about twelve years previously, but there is no record of his ever having visited Higher Kiln Quarry.
It was not until 1939 that a systematic and scientific examination of the caves in Higher Kiln Quarry was begun by members of the subsequently formed Devon Spelaeological Society, and this quickly resulted in two important discoveries.
The first was Reed's Cave, where, on May 6th, an extension containing many beautiful stalactites was entered. In June, attention was directed to the openings at the southern end of the quarry and this revealed the presence there of a rich Pleistocene bone deposit in the cave now known as Joint Mitnor. As the result of excavations carried out there during the following two years by members of the Torquay Natural History Society, under the direction of the late Mr. A. H. Ogilvie, over four thousand bones were found, representing sixteen species of mammals including the hippopotamus, straight-tusked elephant, narrow-nosed rhinoceros, bison, fallow deer, lion, bear and hyaena. Only a small part of the bone-deposit was excavated and this collection still remains the richest assemblage of interglacial mammalian remains ever to have been found in a British Cave. Excavations were suspended in 1941, because of the war, and were never resumed by Ogilvie because of his advanced years. He died in 1950 at the age of eighty-seven. No further large-scale work was subsequently undertaken until 1960, when Leslie Neale and Antony Sutcliffe started setting up the cave as a demonstration site, a project which it is hoped to complete towards the end of this year. £150 was given by the Nature Conservancy for this purpose.
Meanwhile several other interesting lines of research were being developed by other workers, in Higher Kiln Quarry. Cave dwelling shrimps and springtails were found in Reed's Cave and John and Winifred Hooper commenced a study of the Horseshoe Bats which were often to be found in the Caves of the quarry and in other caves and old buildings in the district. They attached numbered aluminium rings to over 3,000 of these creatures and then followed their subsequent movements. They found that Greater Horseshoe Bats live for at least fifteen years and recorded flights of up to 40 miles.
A detailed study of the geology of the area around the caves was undertaken by Gerard Middleton who recorded, among other features, a bed of volcanic ash, of Devonian age, interbedded with the limestone, and a fault, both exposed underground in the nearby Baker's Pit Cave, and a lamprophyre dyke, exposed on the surface in Higher Kiln Quarry. J.F.N. Green studied the terraces of the River Dart and showed that the flat hilltop above the caves, upon which Buckfastleigh Church is situated, had during early Pleistocene times been the bed of the River Dart, now flowing 150 feet below this level. This conclusion received independent support from those who had been studying the insides of the caves below, who had concluded from their form that these had been formed by solution below the water-table (in the phreatic zone). The caves had probably been drained quite quickly as the result of down cutting of the valley of the Dart and showed little evidence of secondary above-water table (in the vadose zone) stream action. The occurrence in the caves of immense quantities of Dartmoor-derived river pebbles added further support to Green's theory.
Thus, by the time of the auction of Higher Kiln Quarry, a considerable amount of research had already been carried out in the caves there which, in consequence, were well known to cavers throughout the country.