Six years ago, during a trip to the seaside town Margate, England, my family and I visited a site known as the Shell Grotto. When it first opened to the public, in 1838, it was advertised as an unexplained mystery. Apparently workmen had stumbled upon the “curious and interesting sight” while digging in the garden of a cottage. Further investigation revealed a subterranean network of passages and a chamber covered in approximately 4.6 million seashells, laid out to form a 2,000-square-foot mosaic spanning walls and archways and a domed shaft that lets in a narrow beam of light. Today the shells — round winkles, long razor clams, mussels, other less familiar specimens — are mostly faded in color, some blackened with dirt.
Who made this grotto, and why? Theories veer from the wacky to the mundane. One writer made a case that the walls were built at Twickenham by Alexander Pope, the 18th-century English satirist, then transported to Margate and concealed underground. In the 1940s, a medium claimed that the grotto was dug out and adorned by a lost tribe of Israelites in celebration of their safe passage from Egypt. Skeptics point out that shell grottoes are a recurring feature of English architecture, and that it might be in the attraction’s private owners’ interest to suggest a more mythic history.
It seemed bizarre to me that, even now, no one knows how such an elaborate creation came to be. I began researching the grotto’s origins in earnest, returning to the Shell Grotto repeatedly to pore over the on-site archive. I tracked down the few books and articles published on the topic. I got in touch with a researcher who claimed to have located evidence that the grotto was built by the Phoenicians, in worship of the hero god Melqart.
This was a familiar pattern. I’ve always been prone to fixating on mysteries. Like many others, I went through a phase of fascination with true crime, until all that human suffering co-opted for entertainment became too much for me. Still, at dinner parties I sometimes pose the question “If you could find the answer to one mystery, from any point in history, which would it be?” Other people rarely seem to have given this much thought. I keep suggestions on hand: Who was the Zodiac killer? Are U.F.O. sightings real? What are the origins of the universe? And I could write a whole book about “ambigudates” (when you don’t know whether you’ve just been on a date or not).
Of course, I’ve tried puzzling out the reasons for my obsession with uncertainty. It might just be neuroticism. But it’s also the sheer absorbing pleasure of a good historical mystery (especially one not involving human suffering). Think of Alice, “burning with curiosity” at the sight of the white rabbit who pulls a watch out of his waistcoat, and tumbling down after him into Wonderland. Unexplained phenomena offer a tantalizing opportunity to take on the role of an investigator, not just receiving information but scrutinizing it, seeking it out, advancing possible solutions. There are no banal details, only intriguing clues to be studied. As any writer or reader knows, suspense is one of the surest ways to captivate — and when life is difficult, or just a little dull, what a joy it is to be swept away.
Does this make us busybodies? Not according to Michel Foucault, who in his famous defense of the “vice” of curiosity described it as a form of concern or care: “a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes.” This seems right to me. I’m not talking about conspiracists or fantasists. An earnest desire to know more than we do demonstrates, I think, an attitude of openness to things — and to discoveries that may complicate our current views. It also requires us to accept that there may ultimately be no satisfactory answers. Sometimes the case goes cold. Or maybe there is a way of finding the solution but we prefer to keep our options open. These days, when most questions are easily put to bed with a quick Google search or “Hey, Siri,” certainty is what’s expected of us. Mysteries, big or small, are a reminder that parts of reality are too ambiguous for that.
At the Shell Grotto, visitors receive a printed map with a key to some of the more baffling forms in its mosaic. There’s a “phallus symbol,” a “tortoise panel,” a “tree of life.” Some theories have taken these images as evidence for ancient and sacred origins. But as the map also notes, these descriptors were just lifted from an old pamphlet; we can interpret the shapes and patterns however we wish. That’s the thing about unsolved mysteries — they leave a space where multiple realities are simultaneously possible, and we are left to make our own meaning. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test: What you see may say more about you and how you understand the world than anything else.
As it turns out, the grotto’s puzzle could potentially be solved. In the 1960s, a sample from the mosaic was carbon-dated to between 1570 and 1770. But the owners were advised that many more samples would be needed to better understand the site’s origins. The cost is high, and there are apparently other conservation-related priorities. For a while this frustrated me. Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, it’s the mystery of the grotto that gives the place its particular magic — the powerful effect of not knowing, uncertainty’s capacity to elicit close and prolonged attention, sparking the imagination with possibilities just as revealing as anything we know for sure. Gradually I have grown to be grateful that the grotto is stewarded, and perhaps was even created, by people who understand this.
Gabrielle Schwarz is a freelance writer and editor living in Britain.
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