The legend of the Treacle Mine has been a joke played on the gullible in Kent and across the country since the 19th century.

Lewis Carroll may have started the idea when he wrote Alice's Adventures In Wonderland in 1865.

At the Madhatter's Tea Party, the Dormouse tells a tale of three children who live at the bottom of treacle well.

"What did they live on?" asks Alice. "Treacle," comes the reply. "But why?" she asks.

"It was a treacle-well," replies the Dormouse.

Kent has at least three villages alleged to be the site of ancient treacle mines - Tudeley, Frittenden and Tovil.

Across the country, Sabden in Lancashire, Chobham in Surrey, Crick in Northamptonshire, and Pudsey in Yorkshire also have strong treacle-mining folklore.

The theory espoused is usually that thousands of years ago the land was covered by beds of sugar cane that have been crushed under later rock formations, rather like oil or peat, to make sticky black treacle just waiting to be mined.

Most communities do their best to promote the myth. There is a Treacle Mine pub in Grays in Essex, another in Polegate, East Sussex, and a Treacle Mine Road in Wincanton in Somerset.

Paddy Wex recorded a song about the Crick Treacle Mine and the alleged superiority of its treacle to that from Pudsey or Tovil. (Total nonsense of course! Tovil's is the best!)

When Albert Reed's factory was operating in Tovil, it always entered a Treacle Mine float in the Maidstone Carnival, and the Valley Conservation Society named one of its nature reserves in the Lower Loose Valley "Treacle Wood."

The Kent and Sussex Railway has a Frittenden Treacle Mines wagon.

The Frittenden mines are said to be entirely the invention of villagers in the 1930s. When newly wealthy tourists began arriving by car, locals loved playing a joke on the incomers by suggesting they visit the treacle mines and issuing long and complicated directions down the narrow rural lanes on how to get there.

But that has not stopped the local Seven Champions Molly Dancers from claiming that their costumes and dances stem entirely from the traditions of original Treacle Miners.

Chobham may have some foundation for its mines. In 1853, a British Army division had been camped on Chobham Common.

When the order came to leave for the Crimea, they buried their stores - including barrels of treacle - which the locals soon dug up after the soldiers had left.

The likely story behind the Tovil Treacle mines is simpler and perhaps less attractive.

For centuries the area was home to many paper mills, who made their product from old rags.

In the 1850s, Samuel Hook tried a new method of making paper from straw. The road where his mill stood is still called Straw Mill Hill.

The pulped straw was cooked in hot alkali. After the fibre was separated to make the paper, there was a thick black liquid residue.

Should the company have decided to dispose of the waste by dumping it in the caverns off nearby Cave Hill, it may well have looked like treacle oozing from a treacle mine.

You can listen to Paddy Wex's treacle mining song here.

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