The route continues through two main caverns, "The Great Cave" and "Roger Rain's House", and into a passage, "Pluto's Dining Room" – This is now the furthest point currently open to the public, but before 1990 the show cave extended almost twice its current length; down "The Devil's Staircase" to "Halfway House" along a raised bank path which crossed an underground stream known as "Inner Styx" via a series of four wooden bridges, under "Five Arches" to the junction of Buxton Water Sump.

This section often floods in winter, and occasionally summer, which required regular clearing of debris and mending of the safety fences at the start of the tourist season in April (cave tours were not an all-year event until 1997).

In the mid-1980s, there was a worldwide scare over the possible dangers of radon, a gas found to be present in this lower part of the cave and a potential issue for tour guides frequently exposed to it.

[4][5][6] There have since been efforts to return this area of cave to a more natural state by erasing the history of its show-cave past, removing the wooden bridges which had served generations of paying visitors.

Historically the cave was known as the Devil's Arse, under which name it is described in William Camden's Britannia of 1586: ...there is a cave or hole within the ground called, saving your reverence, The Devils Arse, that gapeth with a wide mouth and hath in it many turnings and retyring roomes, wherein, for sooth, Gervase of Tilbury, whether for want of knowing the truth, or upon a delight hee had in fabling, hath written that a Shepheard saw a verie wide and large Country with riverets and brookes running here and there through it, and huge pooles of dead and standing waters.

[9] Daniel Defoe uses the same name in his A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain (1724–26): ...the so famed wonder call'd, saving our good manners, The Devil's A—e in the Peak'.