Your field of vision is filled with mud, or rather great slobbering cakes of wet mud and gravel adhering to the soles of a pair of boots a few inches in front of your face. The floor, just below your chin, is mud too, three or four inches deep; you wriggle through it, like an earthworm. The walls and roof, hardly any further away than the mud, are of fluted and serrated limestone, studded with small eroded fossils sticking out like razor-edged coathooks. They have waited several million years to detain you as you wriggle past. Somewhere up in front, beyond the mud, the boots, and the person wearing them, something is happening. There are grunts and groans and the clink of a crowbar, then grating and scraping as loose slabs of rock object to being manhandled into a position that allows their sharing the passage-space with a human intruder. You tactfully delay enquiry as to the results of the contest until the sounds of struggle briefly cease, bar someone panting, and of course that eerie rhythmic thumping that you have realised is your own heartbeat, amplified by the confines of the tiny passage in which you are lying prostrate.
"Does it go?"
"One more block to move - but I can see ten feet beyond".
Another ten minutes waiting; you start to shiver. The enforced idleness allows what little warmth your previous exertions had imparted to the water between you and your wetsuit to seep away. Then louder sounds ahead, struggling and muttering - and suddenly the mud and boots in front of you convulse and suddenly retreat, like a piston into a cylinder; then they slither to one side, and disappear over a hump in the floor, leaving only blackness, and the passage wall curving out of sight.
"What's happening?"
The answer is garbled by an echo; you will have to follow and find out...
And, until this afternoon, whatever lies round that bend has been as remote as the headwaters of the Amazon, as remote as the last uncharted Himalayan peak. Man has set foot on the moon, but not here; no scientific equipment has ever probed, no satellite has ever scanned. And this is England, on a September afternoon, quarter of a mile from the layby where you left the car and half an hour's drive from home.
You are about to enter the unknown....
This is what being a moldywarp is all about.
The Pennines, or Pennine Chain, known to generations of schoolchildren as 'The Backbone of England' are not a range of mountains by most people's standards; in places they are hills, in places moors, and in places just a wide belt of up-and-down country where the 'downs', the valleys, are often more noteworthy than the somewhat-amorphous 'ups'. They extend from Derbyshire to the Scottish Border, and are traversed by the Pennine Way, a long-distance footpath for long-distance walkers desirous of achievement. Overall they offer little to the climber, apart from the gritstone edges and some limestone crags in the Peak District; further north there are some individual hills that come close to deserving the name of mountain, namely the Three Peaks - Ingleborough, Whernside and Penyghent - in Craven, and the more remote and lonely fastnesses of Mickle Fell and Cross Fell in the far north.
Geologically, the Pennines are almost all of Carboniferous strata, generally sandstones and grits, but in some areas limestones either emerge from beneath these, or an interbedded with them. The finest limestone scenery, not only in the Pennines but in England, is in the Craven district of North Yorkshire (more properly the old West Riding) where the rock forms great flat-topped benches along the valley sides, edged with gleaming white scars and capped by bare pavements of fretted rock. It is this bed, known to geologists as the Great Scar Limestone, that forms the broad plinths from which the Three Peaks rise, and which contains many of the most extensive caves in the British Isles.
Limestone has one property unique amongst England's rocks. It dissolves, slowly, in water. Thus streams, rather than flowing across it, tend to disappear down holes into it, and reappear at the base of the rock, where it rests upon strata which behave in a more conventional manner. These streams produce caves and potholes, which riddle the Craven area, where it has been said that if one stamped upon the ground it would reverberate like a drum. Technically, geomorphologists refer to this type of terrain, dominated by features produced by solution, as a 'karst' landscape. A pothole, by the way, is simply a cave with some vertical sections in it that compel explorers to use climbing aids like ladders and ropes; most of the largest underground systems combine 'pothole' and 'cave' sections, at least where the limestones are thick enough to permit reasonable vertical development. In Craven some of the larger systems attain a depth of around 200 metres (relatively insignificant compared to holes in continental karst areas such as the Pyrenees, which may exceed 1200 m): the longest caves in Great Britain are to be found here; the Lancaster-Easegill system at xxxxx currently rates xxxx in the league table of the world's longest caves.
The thick limestones of Craven are exposed over a relatively limited area; east of Wharfedale and north of Ribblehead they dip beneath slightly younger strata known as the Yoredale Series, which consist of an alternation of limestones, shales and sandstones or grits, an alternation responsible for the typical stepped appearance of the hillsides in Wensleydale, the valley of the River Ure or Yore, which gave the series its name. Here the limestone bands are much thinner than on Craven, rarely exceeding thirty metres, but they are continuous over very wide areas. This type of geology typifies what we generally term 'the Northern Dales', running from Wensleydale through the valleys of the Swale, Greta, Tees and Wear, northwards to the Tyne Gap, and from the fringes of the Durham Coalfield west to the great fault scarp overlooking the Vale of Eden.
Streams sink into the Yoredale Limestones and flow underground in just the same way as they do in the Great Scar Limestone further south, but the beds are of insufficient thickness to produce major potholes; horizontal caves tend to predominate. The sandwich-like nature of the geology, and gentle dip of the beds, means that streams can sink into the limestone in one valley, and flow underground for long distances, following the dip of the rock and sometimes passing beneath surface watersheds. Thus there is potential for major cave systems in many places. This potential has only just begun to be realised in the last two or three decades; whilst caving and potholing clubs have been turning their attention to Craven, and the country's other 'classic' caving areas like Derbyshire and South Wales, since the early 1900s, the Northern Dales had been relatively neglected. It is only relatively recently that cavers have started exploring the wide pastures offered by the Yoredale limestones, and finding both lengthy stream caves, and ancient 'fossil' cave systems often intersected by the workings of the 19th century lead miners.
It was in this area that the Moldywarps Speleological Group began exploring caves in the mid 1960s, the group which I have been, and remain, an active member of. We were fortunate enough to arrive on the scene at a time when some of the more remote limestone outcrops had never even been visited by cavers, and occasional cave entrances still lay wide open and unentered, known only to the odd gamekeeper and shepherd (who were much too sensible to think of entering them). Also, this was a time when technological advance - notably the introduction of the wet suit - was changing the face of caving. The simple wetness of a cave was no longer a major obstacle; in the 'early days' cavers would resort to bizarre behaviour such as daubing themselves with grease to try and keep out the cold - now one simply wore a neoprene suit, got wet, and stayed (relatively) warm. As a result we were able to explore and survey quite a number of miles of new cave, not just in the Northern Dales, but also in other parts of the country which possessed limestones that had been overlooked by cavers. The stories of some of these explorations are told in the following pages.
2. THE CAVER, BOTH SINGULAR AND COLLECTIVE
There are perhaps two motivations that draw human beings into dirty, dank and dripping holes in the ground. One is that the person simply likes exploring holes in the ground, and appreciates the sort of things found down there; the second is that the physical vicissitudes suffered in forcing one's person down and through the aforesaid hole in the ground provide a backdrop against which the person can explore and appreciate themselves.
Whilst most cavers would admit to elements of both types of motivation, I would always claim membership of the first category before the second. I find the things one sees down holes in the ground very attractive, but quite frequently find myself regretting the fact that getting to see them hurts so much. The physical hardship, like hitting oneself over the head with a hammer, feels best when it stops; for me 'dry trousers afterwards' is, or at the time feels like, the happiest moment of a caving trip.
For others, for whom caving is more of a sport, it is quite different; the reward is in having overcome a difficult obstacle, or in savouring the human interaction necessary in a team. Here caving overlaps most closely with conventional sports, although its rewards are not so easily shared with the general public. Cavers in their retirement do not sit in front of mantlepieces laden with silver cups commemorating 'Henslers Long Crawl in ten minutes under par' or 'five sumpings in an outing'. The danger of such approach is that, having advanced from grade to grade in the difficulty of cave explored, the tyro, with a requisite number of grade V trips under his belt, feels he has "done it all"; he may move on to some alternative exhilarating pastime such as free-fall parachuting, bungee jumping or shark dentistry. where ordinary mortals are more likely to watch and applaud.
A third reason for becoming involved in caving - more of a reason to maintain an interest than to make the initial trip underground - is that an individual may find his or her own raison d'etre in taking on a specific role within a group of cavers. It may be helpful to spell out a few of these roles.
At the forefront when it come to new explorations - with which most of this book is concerned - are the pushers or ferrets, almost always of rat-like proportions and terrier-like tenacity, who will force their way down constricted passages where no man has ever gone before. Behind them come the main body of cavers, generally honest men and true, of more substantial proportions. They may need to chisel off a few corners or dig away the odd gravel bank before they can follow the pushers, but when they do so they will (with no more than the usual continual moaning, which is tolerated) carry out survey work and digging. Then there are the scientists; even underground ,they have their usual aura of mystique. They do things like measuring radon levels in cave air, collecting drips from stalactites and tracing underground streams with vivid dyes (or, more soundly from an ecological standpoint, with tiny invisible spores which they collect in nets strung across the risings of cave streams). And finally, at the back (or even sitting in the sunshine outside as 'surface command') there are encouragers and chroniclers, who will organise meets, prospect likely sites for 'digs', draw up surveys, and write up accounts of new explorations for club journals or other publications. Their role is to some extent vicarious; late at night, over cups of strong coffee, they will de-brief the bemuddied and exhausted ferret, tape-recording or writing down details of his discoveries before he forgets them. They have various reasons to excuse their lack of physical participation in underground affairs; sometimes it is fatness, or cowardice, or having (like the writer) large bones.
The communal behaviour of cavers is also rather fascinating. Their collective gatherings of cavers may call themselves clubs, groups or societies; such bodies are used both to gain the therapeutic fellowship of like-minded individuals, and to share both caving hardware and information.
There have been several long-established caving (or caving-and-climbing) clubs in the North of England, active for half a century or more - the Bradford Pothole Club, the Craven Pothole Club, the Gritstone Club, the Northern Pennine Club, the Yorkshire Ramblers Club, and others. Such bodies usually have an impressive track record of cave discoveries, often made in the days when illumination by candles and the use of rope ladders and old tweed jackets were the norm; they often have their own club cottages, and their individual hierarchies, rules and traditions. Almost all their memberships are male; a few clubs, seen by some as the last bastions of chauvinism, still persist in excluding women, even in the last decade of the 20th century.
Then there are the college and university clubs, with a high through-put of members, and a reputation both for some of the most epic new explorations (notably the University of Leeds Speleological association, simply ULSA to initiates) and for a rather large number of cave rescues. One danger, more apparent a few years ago, is that such clubs aimed to put their members through a crash course that enabled them (or at least the survivors) to tackle the most severe caves and potholes within a few months. The careers of such cavers often do not outlast their two or three years in academia; they return to real life to be engineers and chartered accountants, and polish the car on Saturday afternoons..
Thirdly, there are a larger group of small clubs and groups, many relatively ephemeral, often based on no more than a group of friends who decided they liked both caving and each other's company. The Moldywarps Speleological Group falls firmly into this category; it has never been a cave club in the organised sense of the word. In the very early days we talked of constitutions and subscriptions; in a fit of officialdom we actually produced a membership form once upon which the parents of under-18 members had to indemnify the Group against losing their sons and daughters. One set of parents actually signed, which may have said something about their regard for their offspring. Thankfully such formalities were soon abandoned, and we became simply a loose group of cavers with similar interests in either the Northern Dales or other out-of-the-way caving areas, predominantly concerned with new explorations rather than 'tourist trips' down known systems. The unifying point was really the group Journal, published every year or two, which included accounts and surveys of all new caves.
Most caving clubs have one annual event, the club dinner, which attracts all types of cavers, active, dormant and moribund. Inevitably some clubs cherish a reputation for intake of liquid beverages comparable to that of a large swallow hole in flood conditions, and the consequent fact that no inn or hotel would ever host such an event a second time.... One early Moldywarp dinner was booked and arranged until the landlord realised we were cavers, when we were promptly unbooked. Many dinners have been quite memorable - the one in Swaledale where we were greeted by a blackboard chalked with the memorable text 'Mole Dies Private Party'. After-dinner recreation can take on a variety of forms; one is indoor caving (where furniture and fittings are ingeniously utilised to create a cave environment). A variant on indoor caving is the squeeze machine; ours was a Graham Stevens creation consisting of a stout baseboard and two upright poles, up and down which a horizontal bar could be slid and clamped in position, producing simulated bedding plane squeezes, ideal to work off the effects of a heavy meal. (1)
In the early days we regarded other cave clubs (especially the long-established ones) as rivals, out to snaffle caves from under our noses; the Craven Pothole Club were regarded as an especial threat, and I remember the thrill of horror when we saw their dreaded initials embossed on the doors of a pair of Wensleydale garages! Had they opened up a new headquarters and tackle store in the Northern Dales?. It was only later that we realised that the true interpretation of the monogram should be 'Carperby Parish Council'... Thankfully such rivalries soon faded, along with secrecy and political intrigues, as we realised there were enough caves for everyone to share. Quite a number of cavers found they could happily share allegiances with two or three clubs and groups, which made for better communication, although inevitably the odd moment of friction arose when it came to such mixed parties making a new discovery, and the resultant question as to which club name it should be recorded under. The quest for guidebook glory was well seen when one small Yorkshire club named a find 'Aardvark Hole' so that their discovery would be on the first page of the guidebook... sadly it turned out to be a rediscovery of an already-known cave, so they never got in at all.
Turning back from clubs to individual cavers, it is interesting to observe how cavers start and end their careers, and how their interests affect their relationships with more conventional members of the community. The 'first trip' more often produces enthusiasm than revulsion, although I have seen cowardly novices scuttle back to daylight when confronted oversoon with quite normal procedures such as total immersion in liquid mud. As a rule, if a person can be persuaded underground in a fairly sensible cave, they will, with encouragement, embark upon a caving career that may last from a few months to many years. Many, however, baulk at the first hurdle of actually entering a cave, or at least one without electric lights and concrete pathways.
In its early days the group was almost predominantly male, despite a bold but quite fruitless attempt to recruit (using posters asking "Are you mouldy? are you warped?") from the sixth form of Darlington Girls High School. We have never attracted many unattached female cavers, although women can of course be just as good cavers as men; a few clubs were marked by having a 'hard woman' fired by a frightening determination to prove herself. One we met was reputed to break away from the main party, whilst walking up the fell towards a cave, to crawl through drains and conduits beneath the path as she couldn't wait to get underground.
Even more worrying, when I once went on a trip with the same club, I found the male cavers queueing up in a spray-lashed chamber at the foot of a waterfall pitch to have the the same lady tie their lifelines for them... I submitted (it seemed the done thing) to having my perfectly-good bowline and half-hitches undone and retied, then struggled up a ten-metre ladder climb under a considerable waterfall. At times my attachment to the ladder felt as if it was restricted to one fingernail; it was one of those times where the only breathable air seemed to be directly beneath the peak of ones helmet, everything else was falling water. At length I was hauled, gasping and spluttering like a landed fish, over the brink, where the lifeline-man reached out to help me untie - then the knot just fell apart. "Funny bowline that"...
The active life of most members of the Moldywarps was no more than three or four years, although some stayed the course for rather longer. By their mid-twenties many sadly found that the allure of things like marriage, respectability, and knees unmarred by scar tissue or embedded bits of limestone, too strong; only a few have maintained a lively (although not necessarily over-active) interest for a decade or more.
Sometimes retirement is forced. Occasionally a partner ensures that their spouse renounces caving for ever, as in one horribly embarrassing incident where a former moldywarp was forced to state aloud, in front of me, that 'now he was a husband and father' he would be a responsible individual and never go underground again!. 'Tell him, David, tell him...you said you would...'. At other times the end of a caving career is announced just as finally, although less dramatically, by the delivery to the doorstep of an on-going caver of everything to do with the retiring individual's caving life - the battered carbide lamp, the helmet and boiler suit, the tattered bundles of cave surveys, along with an apologetic little note saying he hoped "they might come in useful".... Others fade out gently; an interest in industrial archaeology, with occasional trips into fairly easy old mines, is one respectable exit route from a caving career. Others maintain an interest in karst geomorphology, but do it from the surface, building dams to send flood pulses down sinkholes, and taking flow readings at resurgences, but steering increasingly clear of physical involvement in what happens in between.
The other topic that has to be addressed in such an introduction to cavers and caving is that of danger; caving, and especially 'potholing' are perceived in the public eye as dangerous sports. In filling in forms for insurance proposals it is often wise to state one's hobby as 'speleology', in the hope that whoever reads it will not understand the word; the more emotive 'potholing' is a good word to impress ones peers with (at the stage in life when impressing one's peers is thought important), and to worry maiden aunts with at the teatable. Obviously exploring caves can be dangerous; equally obviously, a lot of the skill comes in recognising and obviating the dangers. In quarter of a century of moldywarping no member of the group has ever had a serious accident (for which we are profoundly thankful), although there have been some near squeaks; we have never troubled the English cave rescue organisation, although there was one little incident in Ireland which doesn't really count (but which you can read about, if you really want to, further on). It remains true that, statistically, one is safer actually down a hole than driving to and from its entrance.
3. CANDLES AND FLAMING FRUIT: THE BEGINNINGS
For me, it all started in 1959, when I was eleven. British Rail were offering regional runabout tickets, lasting for a whole week, for 12s 6d; one of the places one could go from Darlington, where I lived, was to Richmond, the medieval market town at the foot of Swaledale. So it was that three eleven-year old boys, exploring a riverside footpath found themselves staring into the dripping and gloomy portal of an old copper mine adit, half a mile upstream of Richmond bridge. We returned to the little shop beside the bridge to buy candles and matches, and to be told by the old lady there that the mine was very dangerous, and that a soldier from nearby Catterick Camp had gone in and never reappeared.(2)
We were impressed - and hurried back to commence exploration. Weekend by weekend we explored the mine, bringing wellington boots when we met water, and graduating from candles to bicycle lamps; sketch surveys of the explored passages were attempted week-by-week in the back of school exercise books. In actual fact, we never got very far; years later, when a foot-and-mouth epidemic kept us from the Dales proper, we came back to the Richmond Copper Mine to explore and survey, and find that we had only seen the first couple of hundred metres (out of over a thousand) in those early days.
From then on there was quite a group of embryonic cavers at the Darlington's Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, who periodically put pressure on masters to form a proper caving club; quite understandably, the masters were wary. Nevertheless, a few of the easier caves in Swaledale and Teesdale were explored, places like Crackpot Cave (a major discovery for the Richmond Grammar School lads, who unlike us had an official caving club, in 1958) and Jack Scar Cave at Middleton in Teesdale. There was only one caving guidebook available at this time, 'Pennine Underground' printed by Dalesman; the original green-covered edition came out in 1959 and the red-backed revised edition in 1965. Cave descriptions, and details of how to find them, were terse; in the case of the few Northern Dales caves which figured, it was sometimes difficult to know if one had found the cave described, or another one!. Word reached us of the Durham Cave Club, who knew quite a few caves 'not in the book'. They had been more active a few years previously, and had never written up their finds; we visited them, motivated by a mixture of respect for senior practitioners of our chosen sport, and a desire to wring any information we could out of them. Some of their activities, after many retellings over pints of ale, had passed into caving legend; so-and-so had found a new passage, or dived a sump, which led to measureless caverns.....
One Durham Cave Club find that was very much a reality though was God's Bridge River Cave near Bowes. I visited it in 1965, wearing the beginner's caving regalia of old clothes, motorbike crash helmet, and clutching a bicycle lamp. It was (and is) not a beginners' cave, at least not in the semi-flood conditions prevailing on that day. This was my first taste of a real Northern Dales cave; a tight squeeze to get in, then an absolutely flat-out crawl in oozy mud, and finally the subterranean River Greta; struggling to keep a footing in swirling chest-deep water, neck cricked under a low roof, with only occasional relief offered by a avens (shafts rising upwards) where once could stand up and shiver. It was impressive, and rather frightening. My white compressed-cardboard scooter helmet was reduced to a soggy muddy mess.
Rather less worrying were the caves on Whitcliffe Scar, near Richmond, accessible by an hour's walk from the bus. The largest cave is over 100m long and 17 m deep; I was told about it by another schoolfriend, Alan (Gel) Holmes, whose nickname it received - Gel's Pot. It was not a pothole in the normal sense, but a slip-rift, formed by a section of the cliff face splitting away from the remainder, on the line of a joint or small fault (in fact very much like one of the North-East Yorkhsire Windypits, see chapter ). There were some short climbs we hauled each other up and down on ropes, and one or two quite interesting pieces of traversing. Alan was (and is) a scientist and innovator; on one of our Saturday visits, when normal mortals were caving with bicycle lamps, he produced an alternative form of cave illumination in the form of wax fruit (the stalk was the wick) in which combustion was encouraged by the addition of sodium peroxide. Light output was good but duration brief, and the end result was not really beneficial to either cavers or cave, both of which ended up spattered in red wax.
To cut a long story short, a few Darlington friends eventually decided to form their own caving group in the autumn of 1966. The only already-existing club in the immediate area, the 'Dales Pothole Club', only met on Sundays, and we preferred to cave on Saturdays, so we thought we would start our own. Sitting in the back of a Percivals' bus as it wended its way down Swaledale, we decided we ought to have a name. Inspiration came from having read that Dalesfolk had referred to early-day cavers as 'moldywarps', much as rock climbers were 'crag rats'.
And so the Moldywarps Speleological Group came into being, with a first 'official meet' on October 29th 1966 when we checked out two caves mentioned in 'Pennine Underground': Kisdon Cave and East Gill Cave, near Keld. We thought we were being daring with the first of these, as the guidebook graded Kisdon Cave 'severe'; at this time caves were rated from 'easy' through 'moderate', 'difficult', 'very difficult', 'severe' to 'super severe'. In fact the difficulty of Kisdon Cave proved to be grossly exaggerated - the cave is a series of dry, if muddy chambers, with a few crawly side passages, intersected by an old mine level; in the simplified modern grading system, from I to V, it merits only a grade II. At East Gill we found two separate caves where the guide only mentioned one.
In the following weeks trips to Crackpot Cave, again in Swaledale, and Jack Scar Cave, near Middleton-in-Teesdale, again showed us the inadequacy of their published descriptions. By Christmas we were regarding ourselves as fairly experienced cavers, but also finding out that caving was not the most comfortable of all sports.
Regarding this revelation, Boxing Day 1966 stands out in my memory. Colin Carson and I hitch-hiked across Stainmore to investigate a cave the Durham Cave Club had told us about, 'Augill Beck Head'; it was not in the guidebook. It had been explored by 'Bill and Eddie', their legendary hard men, was reputedly endless and exceptionally severe. We later renamed it 'Borrowdale Beck Head' (on the strength of the stream name shown on the larger scale Ordnance survey maps); it remains one of the most serious caves in the Northern Dales. It was a bitterly cold day; wisely we did not venture too far into the maze of wet and jagged rifts, but when we surfaced, soaked to the skin, it was dark and a blizzard was blowing. Our dry clothes had to be dug out of the snow; trying to warm fingers on Colin's carbide lamp charred the flesh before it produced any feelings - the cold and numbness put the fastening of buttons and zips beyond our abilities. Shivering, with our clothes draped round us, we still managed to wave frozen thumbs and thankfully gained a lift back to Darlington.
In these early days caving gear was simply a set of old clothes covered by a boiler suit. We soon acquired miner's helmets, which came in two sorts, the 'texolex' or the cheaper compressed cardboard ones which got soggy and changed shape when wet. Bicycle lamps soon gave way to carbide lamps, and then miner's accumulators - County Durham coalpits were closing down apace, and it was not difficult finding one where they were prepared to sell us half a dozen lamps at 25/- each. Charged on a car battery charger they would give up to eight hours light - the drawback was that the rubber seals in the cells often needed replacing, and they were prone to leak highly-caustic alkali that could destroy clothing or skin.
The first few trips showed us that there were certainly more caves around than the guidebook mentioned, although most of them did seem to have been explored before, by the Durham Cave Club and others. Each excursion was carefully written up, and sketch plans drawn after each foray underground. With the help of an elderly duplicator, newsletters were produced, chronicling our weekend efforts; one of the first was distinguished by the fact that the illustrations scratched into the wax of the stencil did not reproduce at all, beyond a scatter of typewritten captions. The group had been in existence five months before we were to achieve the caver's aim, the discovery of 'new' passages, previously unentered by man, at Hard Level Gill, in Swaledale.
4. FIRST BLOOD IN HARD LEVEL GILL
Hard Level Gill, which flows into the Swale just above Healaugh, is typical of the northern tributaries of the Swale; its lower valley is narrow, steep-sided, and well-wooded, but further up, above the well-known picnic spot of Surrender Bridge, it is wider, bleak and scarred by lead mining. At Surrender Bridge and Old Gang are ruins of old smelt mills. Until a few years ago these simply served as ready quarries when local farmers needed some stone, but they are now scheduled as ancient monuments. A little above the Old Gang Mill there is a short gorge where the stream cuts through the Undersett Limestone, a bed only about 10 metres thick; at the head of the gorge is the small but picturesque waterfall of Hard Level Gill Force..
The entrance to Hard Level Gill Cave is right beside the waterfall, a couple of metres above the plunge pool; carefully traversing round the pool, one scrambles up into a short hands-and-knees crawl, then reverses to drop feet-first down a manhole in the floor, landing in a tiny chamber where water rushes in from the stream outside, and disappears down an impenetrable fissure; that is all one ever sees of stream responsible for the formation of the cave. There is however, another way on, up over boulders into a low chamber with dim daylight filtering in from the bank of the stream, and then down again into a larger cavern where one can actually stand up (a rare luxury in this cave). There are two routes forward from here, a low-level crawl that obviously takes floodwater in wet weather, and a higher-level parallel passage involving scrambling through boulders. Both routes lead to a sandy chamber with a low side passage (Crypt Junction), then continue their separate courses to finally re-unite in another small chamber with a choke straight ahead and a very low crawl under the right wall.
This was the point reached by a contingent of seven moldywarps on 26th November 1966, one of our first expeditions. We noted several possibilities for further extension, but felt that the passages we had traversed had all been explored before, despite the length seeming at least double the '150 feet' quoted in Pennine Underground. We set about the return journey, which was enlivened by our first real scare. We had already noticed that there was a lot of evidence of flooding in the cave - leaves, straw and other debris caught on the walls and roof. As the prone crocodile of crawling cavers headed out, along the low-level crawl, an ominous rumbling became audible; it increased in volume as we crawled on. We crawled faster; one member, festooned in wires connecting his headlamp to a battery in his pocket, shorted out in a shower of sparks; an old shopping bag someone else was dragging (by the simple expedient of tethering it to their ankle) got jammed in the narrow passage. Tension mounted...
The expected tidal wave of flood water never hit us; we scrambled through the entrance chambers, and up the manhole into the first crawl, and the spray-lashed darkness outside. What we had been hearing was simply the booming of the surface waterfall; there had been no downpour, no change in water level, simply a trick played by the acoustic properties of the cave.
We noted Hard Level Gill Cave down as a promising site for further explorations. Accordingly, a return trip was made on the 25th February 1967. The very low crawl under the right wall at the previous 'end' of the cave was inspected, and proved to be passable - just - as a flat-out grovel, for 12 metres to where it joined another passage. The actual junction was however obstructed by a horizontal tongue of bedrock, dividing the opening into an impassably low slot at floor level and a very tight 'letter-box' above. The smallest member of the team, Steve Peaurt, became the first 'pusher' in the history of the Group, by posting himself through the letter-box, whilst John Longstaff and Phil Robinson had to lie shivering in the pools that preceded it. Beyond the letter-box Steve explored another 50 metres or so of easier crawls, with several possibilities for further extension. There was no sign of previous explorers here; within four months of the formation of the Group, we had achieved the goal of a new exploration.
In April we were back again and I made my first visit to the extension; as on the previous trip, only Steve could pass the letter-box, but the slot below it proved to be floored with gravel, which we trowelled out to produce a pool, through which larger people could squeeze on their backs, three-quarters immersed in icy water. We were impressed by Steve's find (one could almost stanbd up in places), and beyond his limit gained a few more metres of passage before the main way on being choked by boulders.
Steve's career as pusher was brief; one Saturday morning, soon after the second visit to his discovery, we called to collect him for a caving trip to find that nemesis, at least from a speoleological point of view, had overtaken him suddenly and swiftly! A young lady was present. Steve was dressed in a suit and preparing to go elsewhere... At about this time 'Descent' magazine had conducted a survey which revealed that the average caver caved for 2.4 years until stopped by a member of the opposite sex. Sadly, Steve never made anywhere near his 2.4 years.
We were back at Hard Level Gill again in November 1968, when, equipped with the Suunto surveying gear that Martin Davies of the YURT (Yorkshire Underground Research Team) had introduced us to, and, on occasions, with the YURT themselves (Martin and his brother Roger), we started making a detailed record of the cave. We thought we might have found a lower entrance to the system when Roger manhandled a huge boulder out of a hole we had been digging at, nearer the old smelt mill; this opened up Old Gang Cave, but it sadly ended after only 10 metres in a choke of boulders. Martin also showed us a copy of an old map showing the lead mines of the area, which indicated a series of natural caverns beneath Great Pinseat, the fell to the north of Hard Level Gill; the lead mine giving access to the caverns had long been inaccessible through roof falls, but the caverns were more or less in line with the course our survey showed Hard Level Gill Cave was taking. Previously we had thought the cave might just loop round and come out somewhere near the old smeltmill, possibly at Old Gang Cave; now there was a much more exciting possibility - we could have a really lengthy system on our hands. The problem was that the stream which had formed the cave had been short-circuited by the driving of the Hard Level mine; the running water glimpsed just inside the entrance flowed straight down into the old level.
The cave survey was continued in July 1969, when, as the club log records, the surveying of Steve's find, 'February Series' 'took a gruelling four hours, covering 68 metres of passage'; this brought the surveyed length of the cave to almost 200 metres. In March 1970 we were back again, this time armed with the club's new thin man, Graham Stevens. Graham appeared on the Moldywarp scene already an experienced caver, with an impressive track record (including being secretary of the British Speleological Association, which impressed us enormously) and his omnipresent crowbar; the boulder choke at the end of February Series yielded to this fearsome combination, and a narrow descending rift passage was explored for another 21 metres to a large fallen block which seemed to mark a fairly definite end.
The new passages in Hard Level Gill Cave had been earned by some hard work in uncomfortable surroundings; it is not the sort of cave to tempt sightseers! There were still side passages in February Series that remained unchecked, so, after many years had passed and distance had, as usual, lent enchantment to the memory, I returned with Robin Sermon on a September evening in 1991, almost quarter of a century after that first trip. With the two of us wobbling up the track in full caving gear on Robin's Yamaha 85 motorbike, it felt just like old times - and in the cave it felt like old times too. It hurt just as much... First, serene in the knowledge that I remembered every nook and cranny, I took a wrong turning and got wedged, then after Robin had talked me out of that impasse, he got stuck himself trying to repeat Steve's self-posting feat in the letter-box; finally we managed to dig out the low level slot again, which had silted up, only to find the main passage of February Series come to an abrupt and rather surreal end, choked by a great dune of pure white sand, a complete contrast to the pebbles and mud flooring of the rest of the system. Robin came back a few weeks later with Richard Gibson and dug their way over the sand-dune, reaching the 1967 limit, although Graham's 1970 extension seemed to be thoroughly choked up. More recently we have heard that some cavers from Scunthorpe are digging a choke one of the side passages near the end of February Series; we wished them luck! Perhaps Hard Level Gill Cave may yet yield further secrets to a new generation of determined moles.
We found Smeltmill Beck Cave without really meaning to. One May Saturday in 1967 four of us, on motorcycles, set out to investigate Swindale Pots, a series of small potholes above Brough, at the west end of Stainmore. Crossing the Stainmore pass, the weather turned wet, and as we descended towards Brough we decided to stop and look for some shelter. Any geologically-aware motorist driving along this section of the A66 can spot the tell-tale evidences of limestone - exposed rock pavements, dry stream beds and greener-than-green turf - but 'Pennine Underground' did not list any caves here. Leaving our machines in a lay-by, we climbed down a dry stream bed below the road, dropping steeply downhill towards some trees. Trees meant shelter, but we found more than that; they were growing round the head of a gully where, unseen from the road, a strong stream surfaced from twin low cave entrances at the base of the limestone and cascaded down into the valley. This looked interesting!
Donning our caving gear, we crawled into the left hand entrance, and straight into water. Just behind the cliff face there was standing room in a rift which linked the two entrances, but beyond that one had to get down and grovel in a foot of mud and water; there seemed to be several passages, but all were very low. We followed the roomiest for 15m or so, to where the airspace dropped to a few centimetres. Soaked and shivering, we retreated. Back outside, the rain had stopped and the sun had come out; but as we pulled on dry clothes, something rather alarming happened -the level of the pool in the cave abruptly rose by about 15 cm.... and then there was a rumbling and splashing as water suddenly came cascading down the dry stream bed that we had clambered down from the road. This was not going to be a cave to take liberties with in unsettled weather!.
The Ordnance Survey map labelled the stream as 'Smeltmill Beck', so we had a name, further explorations of Smeltmill Beck Cave could wait for another day. That day came in September, by which time Phil Robinson and I had acquired wetsuits, and we had also equipped ourselves with a third wet-suited member, Colin Carson. Colin was studying at Reading University, and was the most experienced caver among us; he claimed some familiarity with the especial joys of wet caves - things like sumps and ducks - through weekends on Mendip.
This time the weather was dry, and the water level seemed a little lower. We half-swum and grovelled round a variety of low and wet passages, finding a few higher sections, and after an hour or so felt quite happy with an estimated 80m or so of cave (although surveying it would be quite a job!). Then, as we worked our way back towards the sunshine outside, Colin found a draught whipping through the low airspace in what had seemed like a side passage. He ducked through and found a higher rift - and another low but draughting airspace beyond. And so it went on; Colin wallowing onwards, chasing the draught, and the Phil and I, pressing our noses to the roof, or taking a deep breath and plunging, wallowing after him from airbell to airbell, becoming increasingly panic-stricken about how we would find our way back out in such watery surroundings. Before discretion could overtake valour, however, the roof suddenly lifted into a gloomy but quite spacious gallery with waist-deep water - and mud everywhere, showing how seriously it flooded. Later named Expectation Passage, this rounded a few corners, and seemed to end, but once again the roof did not drop quite to water level, but left a low wide airspace into which Colin floated; another on-your-back-nose-in-the-roof-job, but after a few watery metres it was over and we once more popped up into higher passage.
This time something was different; after the silence of the entrance series (interrupted only by the gloopings and gurglings that accompanied our wallowings), we could hear running water ahead, and the cave changed character to a proper stream passage, 4-5 metres high and 2-3 metres wide, with shallow water flowing fast over a gravel floor. The next hour was of the sort that feed cavers' dreams, and are only found a few times in a speleological lifetime.
We marched joyously upstream, rounding countless corners, marvelling at a profusion of untouched calcite formations. Everywhere were clusters of straw stalactites, and occasionally quite large stalagmites growing upwards from ledges on either side of the passage. Impurities in the limestone tinged the calcite with a variety of colours, oranges and yellows from iron minerals, traces of green and blue from copper, blacks and greys from manganese. Sometimes we had to crawl over or under fragile bridges of chert; some were unavoidable, and collapsed when we touched them; this in itself was proof that nobody has passed this way before, we were the first explorers. The cave showed no sign whatsoever of ending; after what we estimated as a quarter of a mile (surprisingly correctly, as the survey showed) we stopped in one chamber, on a major bend, and built a cairn. Finding our way back through 'the ducks' posed some problems, but we were soon back in the sunshine outside; a non-caving friend, left sitting by the entrance, was beginning to wonder where we had gone.
We had some cause to celebrate. We had stumbled upon a major cave; it had calcite formations as good or better than anything else we had seen in the Northern Dales; it was, after the entrance ducks, relatively easy going, and it looked as if it might go on for a lot further.
Next day, Colin, Phil, and the Geoffs Langthorne and Wilson went back, and pushed on beyond Cairn Chamber, along more easy walking passage bedecked with glorious formations - the Hanging Gardens - and then through a series of narrow but tall rifts (where some calcited Red Deer bones were found- identified after despatch to no lower an authority than the British Museum) to where the passage suddenly resumed its earlier roomy dimensions. Eventually it forked; to the right a keyhole-section crawl led to a squeeze into a choked aven, to the left wetter going to a near-sump. This time the explorers estimated, again quite accurately, that they had covered a full mile. Smeltmill Beck was now the longest accessible cave in the Northern Dales.
We had found a very big cave indeed; what were we going to do with it?. Obviously some sort of record had to be made, if only to show off what we had found to families and friends. Within a week of the discovery we were learning (the hard way) about cave photography, Colin taking colourslides with an old Kodak Bantam Colorsnap camera, using flashbulbs in a flashgun prone to misfire when operated by wet and muddy fingers. Poor John Cooper didn't have a wetsuit yet, and only got as far as Cairn Chamber before extreme cold forced a shivering retreat. The harder members of the Group probed the extremities of the system for further passages; the near-sump on the main stream passage proved to be a duck ('Hope') leading to another 200m of lower, generally rather damp passages (Handwrecker Series) ending in Halloween Passage where Colin enjoyed himself with a series of ducks and sumped rifts; this still remains the limit of exploration although the main sink for the cave is still half a mile away. Apart from Keyhole Inlet there were no side passages of any significance. We also, rather belatedly and apologetically, met the landowner, Mr Lord, who could not be tempted underground to see his cave, but kindly gave us permission to continue our subterranean activities.
The cave still had to be surveyed; from our experience of using an Ex-Government prismatic compass (prone to complete unreadability when a drop of water got into the prism) to survey much smaller caves, it was not a task we were looking forward to. Then we met Martin Davies of the YURT (the Yorkshire Underground Research Team, a good pithy name for a caving group - coming from Durham we were tempted to rename ourselves the DURT...). Martin's speciality was cave survey. Ordinary cave surveys were often just two roughly parallel meandering lines, a north arrow and a scale; YURT surveys showed everything in glorious detail, with every mud bank and boulder lovingly charted, and both plan and longitudinal sections showing the cave in relation to the surface above, where trees were drawn with such clarity that their species could be identified. The thought of Smeltmill Beck Cave being portrayed so graphically was very appealing, so a joint Moldywarp/YURT survey was decided on; Martin, and his high-tech surveying gear (Swedish compass and clinometer protected from cave conditions by being encased in blocks of aluminium) were drafted in. In August 1968 he went with Colin to the end of the cave and in one eight-and-a-half hour trip they surveyed 1500m of passage, an amazing speed for a cave survey. The end result was every bit as attractive as we had hoped; the cave angled from one joint to another, producing an dramatic concertina-like plan showing that the final rifts of Halloween Passage were only a quarter of a mile in a straight line from the entrance, although one had to travel almost four times that far to get there. The choked aven at the end of Keyhole Passage was only a few feet from the point at which Smeltmill Beck itself went underground, a few hundred metres above the A66. Seeing how a complex cave system like this relates to the surface above is one of the most fascinating things about making a new exploration.
We had one worry about the cave a few years after its discovery. The Department of Transport decided to upgrade the A66, and since the road passes barely 5 metres above the cave roof, we had visions of heavy machinery breaking into the passage; thankfully the carriageway level was to be raised rather than lowered in this section, and so the domains of speleologist and motorist remain safely segregated.
Smeltmill Beck was the first major Moldywarp find, but it almost wasn't... Some years later a member of the Durham Cave Club told us that one of their cavers, Derry Neve, had been searching for caves in the West Stainmore area and found one 'on the escarpment' where he had followed a very low and wet passage that suddenly opened up .. but for some reason on return that he had never been able to relocate the cave (or perhaps could not find his way in again through the low wet section?). 'Derry's Cave' had become a club legend. Was it Smeltmill? One generation of cavers always leaves something for the next, sometimes through oversight, sometimes through inadequate technology; without the advent of the neoprene wetsuit, we could never have explored Smeltmill Beck Cave.
6. BLOWING AWAY THE CHAFF: AYLEBURN MINE CAVE
The Ayle Burn, in the far north of the Northern Dales, is a tributary of the South Tyne, flowing down from the bare fells bordering on the valley of the West Allen, to join the Tyne about two miles north of the market town of Alston. A line of old quarries and a fellside pock-marked with shakeholes shows where the outcrop of the Great Limestone crosses the Burn, as well as a few low crags of the limestone itself, confined to the north flank of the valley. Little of the rock appears to be exposed in the stream bed, and in most seasons there is no sign of any water disappearing underground - yet there is a considerable hidden sink in the bottom of a pool, feeding a major cave system which would never have been discovered but for the driving of a mine level around 1824.
Alston is the highest, and one of the most remote, market towns in England. It is, or was, famed as a centre of the lead-mining industry. Alston Moor was one of the richest mining fields in the British Isles, and is now a mecca to both the geologist and the industrial archaeologist. The lead-mining boom that was to last for most of the 19th century was just beginning when the Ayle Burn level was driven. 168 m from the entrance the miners recognised that they had intersected a vein; they had driven their level just beneath the Great Limestone, where they thought the richest mineral deposits might be found, so they drove a 'rise' (an upward shaft) in the roof of their level. Instead of finding mineral deposits, they instead broke into a natural cave, containing the underground stream that had eroded away their vein. The Ayleburn mine never produced any lead ore (although some tonnage of zinc was produced later in the century) but it did provide access to what was to become a Victorian show cave. The miners explored the cave as far as they dared, and cut one or two small trial workings from it; one miner named Rumney is recorded as having been killed by a falling rock. Soon hardy tourists were being hauled up the rise in a basket, and exploring about 200 m of the stream cave, by candlelight. A description of the cave appears in the celebrated mine agent Thomas Sopwith's book 'An Account of the Mining Districts of Alston Moor, Weardale and Teesdale', published in 1833.
Despite Sopwith's account, the location of the cave seems to have been forgotten until 1948, when it was rediscovered by a Cambridge University party led by Brian Heys. Their survey of the cave shows the passage to end upstream in a boulder choke above a waterfall only a few metres from the point of entry, but to be accessible for about 200 m downstream to an impassably low bedding plane. A few years later the Durham Cave Club reinvestigated the cave, and found their way through the boulders above the waterfall into another 200 m of upstream passage, again ending in a low wet bedding plane.
There exploration stood until Easter Monday in 1969, when the Moldywarps turned their attention to the cave; it had been a hard winter, and we had experienced speleological frustrations with a then-fruitless quest for new cave in the Punchard Gills (see Chapter 13). What especially interested us at Ayleburn as the story that the cave stream, fed by sinks in the bed of the Ayle Burn, was reputed to come to daylight again over two miles away and 120 m lower down, at a spring called Saffron Well, in the valley of the Barhaugh Burn, the next tributary northwards on the east side of the Tyne. This connection was said to have been established by miners putting chaff into the cave stream, and seeing it reappear at Saffron Well. Before water-tracing dyes became available in the present century, quite a number of subterranean streams are said had been traced by this method, or by observing which springs polluted water from mining operations reappeared at. It seemed a fairly plausible technique; it certainly had more credibility than the other traditional method of tracing underground passages by putting a dog, goose or duck down a sinkhole and seeing where it re-emerged (generally with its hair or feathers scorched off!) after its journey through the nether regions.
The geological map showed a gradual dip of the limestone north-westwards, which also seemed to back up the chaff-connection theory. If we could pass the downstream bedding plane, there was a possibility of finding a very long cave indeed.
We found the mine level to be a simple knee-deep wade in water, as far as the rise, a shaft rising into the roof above a Y-junction in the level. The first 3 m were quite vertical; Colin Carson, on whose shoulders the role of 'pusher' currently rested, led the way up by balancing on an old rail we propped against the wall, to free-climb a further 5 m up a steeply-sloping rock chute. At the top was a heavy balk of old timber to which he secured a ladder so the less agile members of the party could ascend. At the top were a few feet of crawl, then a 5 m climb down into the stream passage proper - in fact only a thin leaf of rock separated the cave stream and the roof of the level below, and explained the showerbath of water cascading through the level roof just before the Y-junction.
The downstream passage started off as a high sandy rift, leaving and then rejoining the stream. Further on the rift closed down at stream level and we had to scramble up and down to regain the water; hardly a show cave by today's standards! We passed a high rift where a group of miners, including the redoubtable Thomas Sopwith, had chalked their initials on the wall. And then, gradually, the roof began to descend, walking became stooping, and stooping crawling. Meanwhile, the stream would divert off left and right through impassably low sections, always rejoining the main passage. Eventually, after the stream had left again, there was a savage dropping of the roof, and I was sure we were at the point marked 'too low' on the 1948 plan.
I made a brief attempt on the constriction ahead, but it was horribly low and narrow. Thus I made a selfless decision to pass the glory of new exploration on to Colin, who was at my heels, and awkwardly shuffled backwards to let him wriggle past me; he got far enough to see that the passage seemed to enlarge after a frighteningly tight section, an oval tube about 20 cm high and 40 cm wide. Squeezing his body into this, he jammed his boots on the smooth walls to force himself forward but could not get enough purchase, so I turned round and reversed into the passage behind him, so I could provide some boot-to-boot encouragement. I braced my legs, he struggled, there was a sound of ripping neoprene - and he slid through. Thankfully there was a larger passage beyond, where the stream came back in again. Colin crawled on for another 60 m or so; beyond a second (but easier) squeeze alongside a fallen block, the passage ran on into the hill. Returning, the tight tube was a struggle, and he emerged streaked in blood and mud, with what was left of his wetsuit hanging in shreds around his waist. Sadly, none of us had a camera that day, but the state of his apparel gave us a name for the squeeze, 'The Banana Peeler'.
Further exploration had to wait a few weeks; Colin had to go back to university, and the role of pusher was taken over by Stuart Hodgson, then the youngest member of the group. Beyond Colin's limit the roof slowly started to rise again, and the passage went on and on, passing some sandy side passages and becoming a high rift, its sides scalloped by the fast-flowing water. Stuart in his elation contacted the local press, with the end result that a short and garbled article (on the lines of 'schoolboy tumbles into new cavern') appeared on the front page of the Yorkshire Post. The elder members of the Group were not amused, fearing publicity might lead one of the 'big pothole clubs' to come and steal 'our' cave; accordingly further newspapers were contacted so that we could stress how dangerous the cave really was...'exploration could well be fatal' quoted one, which was perhaps overstating the case a little.
Such problems quickly passed; Stuart was duly penitent and quickly forgiven. But we did have a major cave on our hands, hopefully heading for Saffron Well, still two miles away; it was a bit much for Moldywarp resources to deal with. In the late 1960s, there was only one answer to such a problem - call in the Brook Brothers, Alan and Dave Brook from the University of Leeds Speleological Association (ULSA), a well-known duo with a fearsome reputation for pushing and surveying new caves. Many were the tales told about the Brooks; people had seen them in pubs with their sleeves rolled up, displaying a multitude of scars..." we just had to take our wetsuits off the get through" was the cheerful explanation. Dave Brook actually developed the technique of self-fracture by breaking his own collar bone in one squeeze ('The Collar', in Hangman's Hole). Clubs who had found caves that were too horrific for them to explore quietly phoned the Brook helpline; if anybody could get through, they would. (Their legendary propensity for tight and awkward places, and watery obstacles, was such that those who did not want to be visited by them would fit padlocks to their toilet seats).
The Brooks were also very good at surveying.
Alan and Dave barely noticed the Banana Peeler. Eventually, half a mile or so beyond the squeeze, the procession of high rifts ended where the stream dropped over a waterfall into the largest chamber in the system, 16 m long, 6 m high and 6 m wide; we named it 'Rumney Cavern' after the unfortunate miner who died in the cave over a century before. At the bottom end of the cavern the stream flowed into a muddy pool, and the roof dropped beneath water level, a very terminal sump, definitely the end of the cave for non-divers.
Saffron Well was still a long way off. The geological map suggested that the sump was caused by a north-south fault; we imagined a deep waterfall pitch beyond, and then miles more of the streamway marching north-westwards towards the rising. In 1975 we managed to attract a cave diver, Jerry Murland, to dive the terminal sump; he got through, to find a short section of canal passage, then a second sump, a little more canal, and a third sump... further progress was not going to be easy.
Meanwhile, interests shifted to the upstream end of the cave. It was clear that the cave stream originated in sinks in the bed of the Burn, but these were still some distance from the end of the Durham Cave Club extension. The bedding plane here was a much easier prospect than the Banana Peeler; group members Dave and Keith Errington from Consett grovelled forward to find another hundred metres or so of crawls, with some quite well decorated sections; there were also some quite complicated side passages .... little by little survey and exploration proceeded, taking the length of the Ayleburn Mine Cave to beyond the magic figure of one mile. One of my wife Elaine's first caving trips was a photographic expedition into the upstream crawls; she did not have a wet-suit, and trying to persuade her to look cheerful as she lay in six inches of cold water admiring the stalactites was not an easy task.
A further revelation of the complexities of the upstream passages came in 1977 when two other cavers, Chris Fuller and Steve Torran, from the Oxford and Leeds University clubs respectively, had a look at Ayleburn Pot, a short cave between the Ayleburn sinks and the upstream limit of the Mine Cave. The Erringtons had dug here, thinking that the Mine Cave was only a few metres away, but found the stream to be sinking into an impassably low bedding. In attempting to mole their way into this bedding they quite overlooked a dry side passage, which Chris and Steve squeezed up, straight into a complex of over 200 m of passages, including several sections of streamway, some stalactite grottoes, and a second entrance, making Ayleburn Pot an attractive cave system in its own right. But it did not join up with the Mine Cave. Survey showed that the underground stream was following a twisting and circuitous course. A link with the main system must be very close, but will involve forcing a route along an aqueous gravel-choked bedding plane.
A final twist in the story came in 1992. The lure of the gap between the end of the cave and Saffron Well brought Paul Monico and a new generation of University of Leeds cavers to turn their attentions to the downstream end of the mine cave. More short sumps were passed, but no great length of passage found. Then they decided to put coloured dye in the stream - and found to their surprise that the connection with Saffron Well had been a fallacy all along, an old miners' tale. The underground stream did follow the fault from the sumps beyond Rumney Cavern, but it followed it due south, to emerge from a concealed spring on the north bank of the Ayle Burn, only a few hundred metres from the limit of exploration, and on virtually the same level. So the dream died; virtually all of the cave has been explored (this is a dangerous claim to make; putting it in print is probably the best way of prompting someone to discover further passages). However, without the old story of the hydrological connection we might never have been spurred to make the effort that resulted in one of the few mile-long caves in the Northern Dales.
However, we have a tale with a moral - don't trust chaff tests!.
7. UP AND DOWN THE BUTTERTUBS
Most visitors to the Yorkshire Dales know the Buttertubs Pass, a minor road that winds high over the fells between Thwaite in Swaledale and Hawes in Wensleydale. From Thwaite there is a long straight hill, then a steepening and a hairpin as the road twists up a green scarp, the outcrop of the Main Limestone. Above the scarp, it runs along a narrow shelf with spectacular views down into the ravine of Cliff Beck on the left, and then threads its way between a group of open potholes, the Buttertubs, before making a final ascent to the watershed.
Throughout the Northern Dales, the upper limits of limestone outcrops are marked by lines of shakeholes, conical depressions were water passes underground; a few swallow streams, the majority perhaps just a trickle of marshy drainage. Most shakeholes are simple grassy hollows, but occasionally there is exposed limestone, and very occasionally, fully-developed open potholes. Cave hunting in the Northern Dales frequently entails trekking along endless rows of shakeholes; they may yield small potholes, but rarely any length of cave passage, but there is always the exception to prove the rule, as the Gritstone Club found on Knock Fell where a narrow fissure in a rocky shake led into three miles of natural cave...
The Buttertubs are one of the best examples of pothole development at the top of the outcrop of the Main Limestone; there are other groups at Tailbrigg Pots (north of the Keld to Kirkby Stephen road) and in the remote headwaters of Great Sleddale, but few as spectacular, and none as adjacent to a public highway.
Northern Dales potholes are often something of a disappointment to the cave explorer, because they very rarely lead into horizonal caves. They often drop the full thickness of the limestone - perhaps 15 to 20 metres, and then close down to tiny impassable fissures; descent may involve some amusing gymnastics, or entail the use of rope or ladder, but there is rarely any caving to be done once one is down to the base of the limestone. This seems to be because the potholes are formed, and enlarged, by acidic water trickling down the walls; by the time the water has reached the bottom, it has lost most of its corrosive power. The occasional pot happens to intersect an old phreatic cave system, or might even give access to an active stream passage, but the vast majority are simply blind holes. The Buttertubs are like this; simply vertical shafts with deeply fluted and fissured walls, dropping to rubble floors 10 or 15 metres down. Two are a little deeper, and require tackle for their descents. The largest 'tub', on the uphill side of the road, has a second pitch opening off the foot of the first, but this simply drops another 6 metres and is blind at the foot.
The means cavers have used to overcome vertical shafts have changed over the years. Edward Martel, the French speleologist who was first to descend Gaping Gill, the greatest Yorkshire pothole of them all, used a team of lusty dalesmen to haul him up and down. Then came the development of rope-and-wood ladders, functional but uncomfortably bulky, forming big bundles difficult to manipulate in narrow passages. In the 1950s came the electron ladder, with wire substituted for rope and aluminium 'pencils' for rungs. These were much lighter and rolled up into a much smaller space; their use meant that much smaller parties could tackle major potholes. Electron ladders themselves were overtaken by another evolutionary leap in the 1970s, when what are generally known as 'SRT' - 'Single Rope Techniques' gradually came into vogue. Initially conservative ladder-users saw the initials as standing for 'silly, risky and treacherous' but in a decade or so most were won over. The transition was not, however, complete; some caver still prefer to use ladders, in particular for small and awkward pitches.
Although as potholes go the Buttertubs are relatively minor, this digression into vertical techniques is not irrelevant, as it was in one of the more minor 'tubs' that I had my own introduction to single rope methods. Philip Robinson, the founder moldywarp who had emigrated to Tasmania, had returned to his native land for a brief holiday. He came by air, but had previously done his best to return in a less conventional manner, by being part of the team involved in the exploration of potholes which twice claimed the record of the deepest hole in Australasia. He had been initiated into single rope techniques, and introduced us to a device known as a 'whaletail', which was basically an elongate block of aluminium with three capstan-like protuberances around which a rope could be threaded. With the whaletail attached to one's waist length, a rope wound around all three capstans would allow one a swift descent, around two an even swifter drop, around one... I wound it round all three, and slid the safety catch into position to ensure it stayed there. "Just walk backwards" Phil said; I did so, and found myself poised uneasily on the brink of my tub, with 15 metres of space behind and below, gently rocking backwards and forwards with the spring of the nylon rope. "Err.... now what?" "Just jump".
I jumped. I expected to find myself, comfortably sitting in the tape harness, gliding gently down the rope. In reality there was a rush of air, a thump, and I found myself in a sitting posture at 90 degrees to the usual position people sat in, with legs vertically upwards against the rock wall and my body at right angles. My feet just projected above the lip of the hole; the small change in my pockets (this had been intended as a 'surface day out') was slipping out and clattering into the depths of the hole. I requested assistance, but after briefly assuring me I was in no danger, Phil (struggling to keep a straight face) had raced back to his car to get his camera; a gaggle of worried-looking tourists began to gather, gazing down at me. The tension of the rope pinned me against the rock; only by struggling to pull the rope through the whaletail could I slither slowly, still in this inverted sitting position, vertically down the mossy, dripping rock wall. There was no room for manoeuvre; the posture had to be maintained all the way to the bottom, where I arrived, back-first, in the luxuriant nettles that grew in the shadowy depths.
Several of the Buttertubs swallow small streams, but one does not have to go far to find where the water reappears. A steep scramble down into the bottom of the Cliff Beck Valley reveals two powerful springs, Cliff Force on the east side (of which more in a later chapter!) and the rising for the Buttertubs water, which we called Cliff Beck Head, on the west. Cliff Beck Head was a low arch at the foot of a small cliff, with two quite crawlable passages leading off. The Buttertubs had been mentioned in Pennine Underground, but not their resurgence; we had an unrecorded (if not unexplored) cave, in a very obvious place.
We first crawled up Cliff Beck Head in February 1967. The left hand passage proved to be very wet, and was left for another look in drier weather. The right-hand passage summed up, to me, the fascination of an active stream passage; it was small (hands-and-knees crawling if you didn't mind scraping your back on the roof at times), roughly tubular, and wound round corner after corner, luring one on. There was no escaping the stream, but this meant the passage was alive, an active conduit, almost an organic piece of nature. Any small child who was walked along the bank of an urban river and stared at the open mouths of drains and sewers (now very much a thing of the past) and wondered where they went will understand the fascination. Cliff Beck Head was like that, crawly, wet, but with the air of going somewhere. It didn't really go that far; after insinuating ones body round a considerable number of bends, through one small ox-bow that by-passed an impassably low section of the stream route, one met an impassably low bedding plane - but just before this, a hole on the right led into a high rift aven, the only place in the passage where one could stand up; in fact one could chimney up 6 metres or so, but it narrowed down. Survey showed this to be only a few metres from the deepest point in the largest Buttertub, but sadly there was no connection. The passage certainly carries the water sinking in the two largest potholes.
The other passage, which we came back to some years later, when we had graduated into wetsuits, was quite different. This one carried water sinking further up the main valley, and swung round to run below the surface stream bed. It was a low canal, an easy but aqueous wallow for 60 metres or so to a sump.
Beyond the Buttertubs, the road towards Hawes climbs a final steep ascent, and then crosses the watershed and begins its descent into Wensleydale, along the eastern flank of Fossdale, a tributary of the Ure. There are more caves here; the biggest is Fossdale Beck Cave. If the Buttertubs/Cliff Beck Head system was a relatively straightforward sink to resurgence cave, Fossdale Beck Cave was not.
About quarter of a mile west of the road, Fossdale Beck cuts through the Main Limestone in an attractive little gorge called Wofell Scar. We had pottered here before, and found a few little caves, but it was the sort of place where there are always nooks and crannies worth crawling into. On 3rd April 1972 Pete Holloway and myself had set out to have a shakehole-trek in remote Great Sleddale, but the weather had turned miserable. We opted for prospecting closer to a road, and Wofell Scar seemed a good choice. We soon opened up a 12-metre crawl on the east side of the gorge, then crossed to the west side where we found a hole on a ledge, blocked by one boulder. This was fished out, and I wriggled down; a few metres down I slithered to a stop at an impassable fissure, but there was enough room to stand upright and turn round - and I found myself staring into a beautiful tubular tunnel 1.5 metres in diameter, almost big enough to walk upright in, disappearing into the darkness; from somewhere ahead came a tinkle of falling water. Pete rapidly joined me, and we headed off into the unknown. The tube wound on, over a blind haft in the floor and past various side passages, to a series of avens where a stream joined us and flowed on down a walking-sized passage decorated with spectacular flows of stalagmite. We ad sudden hopes of miles of passage (perhaps running down-dip towards Hearne Beck, the next valley to the west) but it was not to be; all too soon the passage angled left to run parallel to the surface stream outside, and closed to a tight crawl.
However, we had seen enough to know we had found quite an extensive and intricate cave. A full scale call-out of active moldywarps ensued; there were enough leads for everyone to have a go at pushing something. Within a week or so we were back in force; Graham Stevens found the stream inlet just his cup of tea (it entailed a horrible bend where he had to immerse himself in the liquid mud of the floor and call for us to help bend his knees backwards against the joint so he could get round), whilst Chris Langthorne the mover-and-shaker-of-rocks attacked a choked tube a little lower down the gorge and opened a way into another series of passages, rejoining the stream a few metres beyond the constriction which was our downstream limit in the first cave. Fossdale Beck Lower Cave, as we called it, had similar characteristics to our first find - a bewildering mixture of phreatic tubes, low crawls, and occasional towering avens. As well as the near-link on the streamway, we found another passage which all but connected with the Upper Cave, through a constriction one could see through, but which was too low to pass.
Fossdale Beck Cave (we classed it as a single cave, although there was, at least in 1972, no negotiable route between the two sections - someone may well have dug one out since) provided an interesting exercise in working out how a cave develops. The phreatic tube we had first discovered seems to be older than the surface gorge; the small cave we had found on the east bank was probably once part of it. Then the phreatic tube was invaded by a stream - perhaps a Pre-Glacial ancestor of the present Fossdale Beck. This later cut down to a lower level, perhaps after the Ice Ages, then migrated again to its present route. Thus the morphology of the cave records changes in global climate, a common story throughout the Yorkshire Dales. The changes thus recorded are all natural ones, taking places over millennia: a second set of unnatural changes of course happens when cavers explore a cave. These changes are a subject of increasing concern.
One type of change is that effected by cavers wanting to find new passage, or to make an accessible link between known passages. Initially such actions may be fairly minor - the odd boulder and shingle bank is removed - but where there is promise of further extensions more serious modifications may take place. Some Mendip Caves have hundreds of metres of passage that have been blasted to widen them to negotiable proportions. Questions of ethics then arise - how far should one modify a cave? is the removal of obstructions such as clay banks and boulders chokes allowable, but not the wholesale enlargement of a solid rock passage? In a cave like Fossdale Beck, visiting cavers, lured by the prospect of a 'through trip' will doubtless dig out shingle and clay floors to allow a physical link between the various entrances.
More seriously, the passage of cavers through a cave inevitably affects its character. Formations are broken and muddied, litter dropped, rock floors worn smooth by crawling knees (this actually happens!). Some of the most intensely-used caves, if they are not flushed by an active stream, can become bleak and dirty tunnels which would be unrecognisable (thankfully!) to their original explorers; nothing short of a few thousand years of undisturbed natural processes, with perhaps a couple of glaciations for good measure, will restore then to the sort of character we found when we first entered the Fossdale Beck system..
8. WAYS IN THE MAZE: WINDEGG AND DEVIS HOLE
Contrary to public opinion, cave explorers rarely manage to get themselves lost in limestone caves; often they have a stream to follow, or the cave is little more than single passage anyway. There is, however, one cave type in which, wherever you turn, you are faced with with a four, five or six-way junction every few metres; surveys of such places would make the ideal basis of a computer game, or perhaps wallpaper for insomniac speleologists (finding your way out, or in, being an excellent alternative to counting sheep). These are network caves, in which the limestone has been slowly dissolved so as to produce a passage following every joint. Such caves are termed phreatic, being formed by groundwater, beneath the water table. Few network caves are known in this country; they probably exists in considerable numbers, but the problem is finding a way into them, as they are often unrelated to surface features. The first two caves of this type explored in the Northern Dales had no natural entrances at all, only having been discvoered because the old lead miners had accidentally broken through into them.
The first network cave we came across, in the autumn of 1970, was Windegg Mine Caverns. We were introduced to the place by Dave Carlisle, of the Earby Mine Research Group; Dave's main interest was in old mines rather than natural caves, and he had re-opened the collapsed entrance to Alcock's Level at the north end of Windegg Scar, final bastion of the long and impressive rampart of limestone scars that run northwards from Fremington Edge along the east side of Arkengarthdale.
Old mines tend to be hazardous places to explore, and this one was no exception. A few hundred metres into the mine we came to a 'rise', a hole in the roof leading up into a higher sub-level of workings. A little gymnastic exertion, using the 'Parallel Bars', two old timbers jammed across the passage, gained the sub-level, but the natural caverns were higher up still; the most direct route was a greasy 8 m climb, too wide to be comfortable; nearby was an easier but horribly unsafe route up a Climbing Rise (a series of shorter steps constructed by the miners, but potentially lethal as the timber supporting the stone walls had long since rotted away).
The first part of the natural cave we saw was a long bedding chamber (later called 'Carlisle Cavern' after its rediscoverer); off to the right were a series of tall rift passages requiring some energetic traversing, ending in another mined level ending in a timbered ore-chute dropping down into Clay Vein level, which branched off from the entrance passage. To the left of Carlisle Cavern a scramble over a boulder led into an easier rift passage, and then the maze proper, a labyrinth of scalloped rift passages and collapse chambers; the first junction, 'Nineways', set the scene for what was to come. After one of the first trips Graham Stevens boldly attempted a sketch plan of the place, but it became obvious that we needed an accurate measured survey.
The complexity of the cave was not the only problem; with care, that could be handled. The place was also frighteningly unsafe. The mined approach passages were themselves quite dangerous; as well as the obvious hazard of loose rocks, Jan Arrowsmith and I once encountered a dangerous concentration of carbon dioxide when surveying Clay Vein level (we only realised what was happening when we found ourselves yawning uncontrollably, despite the fact that the passage was neither intensely tiring nor excruciatingly boring). The natural passages were also extremely unstable in parts. One week Colin Carson and I surveyed a chamber, reached by clambering up a boulder slope; it was about 3 metres high, with a flat sandstone roof, at the very top of the limestone. It did not feel a very happy place; the floor was a great pile of boulders, and as we clambered over them we heard some rumblings and clatterings beneath our feet as small stones, dislodged by our progress, rattling and clattering as they fell down inside the boulder pile. This was rather disquieting; we drew up the survey, and dubbed the chamber 'Creaking Boulder Cavern'. A few weeks later, Graham was surveying an adjacent series of passages, and his work did not tie in with the first survey; something was wrong in the Creaking Boulder cavern area. The uphill scrambles had gone, and there was a much loftier chamber above a chaos of loose and tumbled rock - in between our visits the whole floor of the chamber had collapsed into the dense network of passages around and beneath it, a movement presumably triggered off by our visit.
Two other incidents, thankfully on a smaller scale, underlined the danger. Once I leaned on the wall of what looked like a perfectly solid rift passage - and a 5 m length of wall simply toppled sideways, having been a leaf-like partition between two parallel galleries. On another visit I scrambled up a boulder the size of a small room, just off Carlisle Cavern, and the whole thing slowly heeled round, whilst I clung to it; thankfully it stopped after moving for about a metre.
Why are the caverns so unsafe? All we could think was that the system had still been full of water until the lead miners drove their levels in the 19th century, thus dropping the water table, and leaving the cave in a state of suspended development; it had just not had time to equilibrate following this unnatural intervention into its natural evolution.
Surveying the system, covering both mined and natural passages, took us about twenty visits over 1970 and 1971; the length of natural cave totalled 1.2 km. The mine workings provided some interesting discoveries; at one point we came across, on the floor, a bottle still quarter-full of colourless liquid (we thought milk, which had gone off as far as milk can go), some rabbit bones, and a copy of the Darlington and Stockton Times dating from just before World War I; the headline was 'Russian Warships in the Dardanelles' and the adverts included 'Doctor Percy's Pink Pills for Pale People'; sadly the newspaper crumbled to pieces on being touched.
Two years later a similar chain of events - the indefatigable Dave Carlisle re-opening another old mine level - led us into a second network cave, at Devis Hole Mine in Swaledale. The mine is situated beside of Cogden Gill, above the well-preserved Grinton Smelt Mill; there are old records of natural caverns encountered in its workings (the name 'Devis Hole' may come from 'Devil's Hole', relating to the miners' superstitious fear of natural cavities). The level had collapsed about 1964, and then there had been by heavy silting (in flood the surface stream sank into the level entrance). Moldywarps, aided by Martin Davies, tried to gain access by digging a shaft in 1970-71, but just missed the line of the level; a year or so later Dave and the Earby Mine Research Group rectified matters, digging sideways from our shaft, clearing 12 m of totally silted level, and finally digging through a roof fall, which they stabilised with timbering and a metal tube, made out of two oildrums, for visitors to wriggle through.
120 m beyond the roof fall, the mine level intersected a complex of natural passages. As at Windegg, the cave system is completely dry, although a very strong flow of water comes out of another mine level lower down the valley (below the Smelt Mill), which is presumably the present-day successor to the circulating waters that dissolved out the cave. The main Devis cave system felt much 'friendlier' than Windegg, although an even more closely-spaced maze, with six-way junctions being frequent. Most of the passages were comfortable hands-and-knees crawls, over a dry mud floor, with a band of fossil corals exposed near roof level; one less comfortable section was where a short but tight crawl was developed entirely within this fossil band. Fossils are interesting to look at, but when they consist of razor-edged silica standing proud of the walls, too intimate an acquaintance is to be discouraged.
Graham master-minded the surveying of the Devis maze. His technique was to mark the centre of each junction using a numbered lollipop stick, topped by an aluminium milk-bottle top (serving as a reflector), so that 'new' passages, when being surveyed, could easily be tied in back to known parts of the complex. One survey trip produced a 'loop' of 500 m length, with 55 side passages to be checked and tied in later! The principal complex, 'the Central Maze', comprised 1.7 km of passages compressed into an area little more than 120 m by 45 m.
There were further natural passages further into the mine; Stuart Hodgson, who was now developing a distinct taste for old mines, led the way in the exploration and survey of Occidental Series, in the far west of the mine workings, reached by a hazardous traverse of passages consisting largely of collapse cavities well above where the old mine levels had originally been.
A common feature of both the Windegg and Devis Mazes is the way in which, at one edge of the maze, the ends (usually chokes) of all the passages heading in a certain direction will line up, as if a feature such as a fault or mineral vein forms a limit to cave development. It is not clear whether such features form the edge of cave development, or simply a linear barrier to exploration, with further inaccessible networks of passage beyond.
Network caves may be relatively common; its just that entrances into them are rather rare. Since our Swaledale explorations the Gritstone Club have found a very similar but even larger maze cave (4 km of passage in an area 320 m by 120 m), this time with a natural entrance; its position, 770 m above sea level on Knock Fell, quite unrelated to present-day sinks or risings, shows how ancient such caves can be.
9. GRIM PLACES: ELLER BECK AND KELDHEADS
I was crouched, neck-deep in very cold water, in a narrow waterlogged rift; above water, the rift had a rather attractive gothic-arched section, although ones appreciation of this was rather tempered by the fact that the walls were both covered in mud, and literally crawling with large and unsavoury-looking flies. Since the space above water was not sufficient to accommodate both ones head and helmet in their normal relationship, the helmet had to be held in front, with the result that both mud and flies made direct contact with ones head...
In front there was little to see except Phil Robinson's boots; he was actually out of the water, lying full length on a fallen slab, and trying to manoeuvre loose boulders into the rather limited spaces available, so that there might be enough space for him to squeeze forwards. Behind, with much glupping and glooping of water, came the approaching voice of Graham Stevens, giving his usual running commentary on the speleo-environment; an accompanying clanking showed he was, as ever, carrying his crowbar. There was no way he could pass the people-choke in the waterlogged rift, and so he thrutched off up a side passage, keeping up the commentary, which terminated with the triumphant announcement "I've reached a sump". Our response was perhaps neither charitable nor considered; "well, dive it then". There was a clanking and glupping, a splash, more glupping, then - silence. He had dived it.... Up to this point we were unaware of Graham's propensity for water; this was a rather worrying introduction...
The scene of our labours, one summer afternoon in 1970, was Eller Beck Head, in a remote valley about three miles south of Bowes. On a summer afternoon or evening, the walk over the fell to the cave, following grassy traces of what we thought was a Roman road (it lined up perfectly across the valley with the squat grey tower of Bowes Castle, which stands in the middle of the Roman fort of Lavatrae), was a very beautiful one. All that spoiled it was the cave.
Eller Beck Head was one of the most obvious open, and apparently unexplored caves, we had ever come upon. The geological map showed that the beck crossed an outcrop of Main Limestone; in actual fact it sank at the head of a lengthy dry gorge. At the foot of the gorge the water cascaded from a black door-like opening in a prominent cliff. There was also an open cave at the sink - Hazel Bush Hill Hole - initially explored by an enthusiastic Stuart Hodgson in his underwear, and later pushed and surveyed by more normally-attired moldywarps to a length of 82 metres and a depth of 12 metres. It was a bit crawly (and obviously flood prone) but there were a couple of exhilarating little climbs down waterfalls; the resurgence cave, Eller Beck Head, was a quite different kettle of fish.
When we initially 'found' Eller Beck, in the summer of 1968, we had written off the resurgence cave as 'too tight', when, after an easy wade for 12 metres, it divided into narrow rifts. Two years later Jan Arrowsmith and I had returned. In chivalrous manner I had let her go first; she slid easily through the 'too tight' rift into a canal that was narrow and low, but definitely passable; even I didn't find the rift a problem. But beyond was a complex of tight waterlogged rifts and chokes that obviously merited a more determined assault by a larger team.
Graham's sump dive came a week later. He later explained that he had felt underwater with his crowbar, waved it around in a sizeable airspace only an arm's-length away, and then followed it. Within a couple of minutes his lamp glimmered somewhere beyond the boulders Phil was rearranging; with an attack from both sides, the partial choke soon yielded. Getting through, however, involved some entertaining moments. Extruding oneself from the temporary dry haven of the fallen boulder, ensured a head-first arrival in a passage with water too deep for ones hands to touch the floor, and a roof only 10 cm or so above the water. It was a case of a wriggle-and-lunge, holding ones breath, then a brief wallow before joining Graham in a chamber where one could actually stand upright, in waist-deep water.
Although dark and dank, this was an infinitely more attractive piece of cave than we had seen so far; two large passages led off. We waded joyfully off in a half-flooded gallery which kept curving to the left - and found ourselves back where we had started, completing a loop. There had to be another way on. Graham found a small aquatic hole at floor level, and vanished again; I opted for a high-level passage reached from Phil's shoulders. Once again two routes rejoined, in a three-metre square passage that was, for a short distance, actually dry; however, the silt floor soon gave place to a pool, and the pool gradually deepened as the roof lowered and the passage rounded several bends, to a point where the airspace was too small even for our sump diver; we named it Disillusion Way. Back in the one dry section of passage, Graham found a body-sized crawl, taking a strong in-draught, which needed a little digging.
A month later, being gluttons for punishment, we were back again, starting the unenviable task of surveying the place. One comment, recorded at the time, was that 'it was not too bad if the hand holding the notebook could shiver in phase with the one holding the pencil'. Graham dug into his in-draughting tube, which proved to be the most horrible part of a fairly horrible cave. It was a tight crawl, full of soft mud, and the mud was literally writhing with a myriad red worms. As one wriggled forward, like a worm oneself, the mud and all its biology were engulfed by the neck and sleeves of one's apparel, and discharged from the trouser legs. After 60' it ended too tight; the only way out was slowly and backwards. It was not the sort of passage to encourage casual visitors.
For all its unpleasantness, the cave is only 200 metres long; there may be a lot more to come!; the local hydrology is rather strange (in dry weather Hazel Bush Hill Hole takes a stream but nothing resurges from Eller Beck Head; the water table falls, and is only drained by a spring further east); it would seem there might be an extensive maze of totally flooded passages, technically a phreas, behind the cave, possibly fed by sinks further afield than Hazel Bush Hill Hole. Caver divers, aided by recent advantages in technology, may be in their element here; more normal human beings are not. I am not going back.
There is one other cave we explored at more or less the same time, that almost ranks alongside Eller Beck Head in sustained unpleasantness, and which also made Grade IV in the guidebook. This is Keld Heads Cave in Wensleydale.
My abiding Keldheads memory is of a local farmer quite amiably telling us that if we wanted caves we should go over to Ingleton. We were standing in front of the quite commodious entrance to the cave at the time, 3 metres high and wide, so I had the temerity to say "well what about that?" "Oh, that's not a cave, it's only a hole where the stream comes out"...
Keldheads was not quite a 'new' cave; the Northern Pennine Club had had a look at it a few years previously, and told us they had been in about fifty yards. If anybody else had explored it, they hadn't publicised the fact - and, unlike Eller Beck Head, this was a cave that could not be described as remote by any stretch of the imagination, being only as few metres below a public road, in well-populated Wensleydale.
'Keldheads' is quite a common Dales name, and simply implies a spring or cluster of springs. This one gave its name to an important lead-mine, the remains of which lie shrouded in woodland 500 m north-east of Preston-under-Scar. There are several springs, feeding Wensley Brook. The one with the 'hole where the stream comes out' is the highest of the large risings. Where the water comes from is still a mystery; it may come as far as from away as from Apedale, over 4 km away up-dip to the north-west.
We first visited Keldheads after being repulsed by a less charitable cave; the scenario of a-quick-look-at-something-on-the-way-home has provided us with quite a few discoveries. This was on the 15th August 1970. Most of the party sat around the entrance, but I had pulled the short straw and sallied underground for a brief reconnoitre, finding a very complex and varied cave. The quite spacious entrance soon lowered to an easy crawl; the stream entered from a choke, and the obvious route on lay through two collapse chambers connected by rather a worrying little crawl alongside a tottering wall of loose blocks; beyond was rather more solid cave again, a bedding plane with a complex of inlet and outlet passages. It was all rather interesting, so much so that Jan Arrowsmith had to despatched underground to come and find me.
Another week passed; this time the attack was carefully planned. We now knew the outlet passages from the final bedding linked up with the main stream, and thus might provide a bypass to the choke. John Cooper was given the task of digging the downstream choke in the first outlet passage, whilst Graham and I unsuccessfully attacked inlet passages. An hour later we returned, repulsed by tight passages and loose rocks, to find John smug and satisfied; he had dug out not one but two accessible routes on from the choke, and was now making mud statuettes. One route simply led back into the other outlet passage, but the other dropped to a low canal, which he had decided was the sort of thing that Graham might rather like.
Many caves contain one notable obstacle, a hurdle to overcome on the way in and be passed with relief on the way out. The Keldheads Duck, a few metres along the low canal, is just such an obstacle, and provided us with some entertaining moments. The Duck comprises a short wet crawl, which doglegs sharply to the right, then left again; the intermediate section of the dogleg, about a bodylength long, has only about 10 cm of airspace. To get round means virtual submergence whilst negotiating two tight bends at the same time, getting ones head and shoulders round the second whilst ones knees are still negotiating the first, and all without the luxury of breathing. On one occasion I plunged in, only to find my lamp cable snag on a rock projection; lunging forwards to the airspace beyond, my head emerged from the water but I found my helmet pulled off backwards, with the elastic chin strap tightening like a noose around my throat. The only way to breathe was to retreat to lessen the stranglehold - and retreat meant one's head was under water again, where (lacking gills) breathing posed certain problems. After several surfacings and gaspings, I was able to convey to my companions that something was amiss, and one of them managed to free the cable. Incidents like this suggest that caving alone is not really a good idea.
Graham was the first through the duck, and into the cave beyond (this experience seemed to have some traumatic effect on him, as he developed an addiction for the place no-one else could really understand). Within a few metres the crawl opened up into a chamber where he could stand up, with several passages leading off; this was later named Doubting Castle, because on the return journey it is very easy to get lost here. Beneath the bouldery floor of Doubting Castle rumbled the main stream; the most obvious way on was a pleasant arched upstream passage, rather like that just inside the entrance. The solo explorer pressed on, following the stream through a variety of crawls; a shale band and fossil corals were much in evidence. Half a hour later he returned, dripping blood from a knee injury sustained on one of many razor-sharp rocks, to John Cooper, waiting patiently on the sensible side of the duck.
Another week passed; a patched-up Graham, along with Colin Carson and Stuart Hodgson, returned to the fray, with the upstream passage still winding on. However, another 12 metres of gingerly hands-and-knees crawling led to a strange conclusion, the arched passage suddenly ending in a blank wall with the stream showering in from a tiny hole, hardly any larger than a tap, on the left. Stream passages ought not to end like this! Questing around, they found a narrow cross-joint running across the roof just before the end, which one could wriggle up, to emerge in a very wide and very low passage a couple of metres above the stream passage. Struggling forwards, the stream was met again, sinking into a hole in the floor to feed the 'tap'. Graham forced a still-lower bedding ahead, but after 10m or so it was too constricted even for him.
The reason for this strange piece of cave seems to be a geological constraint in the form of another shale band, like those seen further downstream. The band forms the floor of the final bedding (and could be dug, with some effort, to allow further progress). Graham pointed out that the cross-sectional area of the passage was much the same as the more comfortable (well, passable) reaches further downstream, it was just four times as wide and a quarter of the height. Staring ahead, helmetless and with ears jammed against floor and ceiling, the passage looked to be narrowing and gaining height again at the limit of ones vision, but such glimpses are notoriously deceptive.
But even with this fairly definite conclusion upstream, the saga of Keldheads was not over. Graham had periodic bouts of his Keldheads fever throughout 1973 and 1974; a large number of different cavers accompanied him on these trips, although the logbook record shows that very few other people ever went twice. The first bout, in which he was aided and abetted by Nev Andrews, an occasional moldywarp who owed his primary allegiances to the Bishop Auckland Caving Club and the University of Leeds Speleo Association, saw the exploration of Monkey Puzzle Passage , a long ox-bow that, starting from Doubting Castle, provided an even less comfortable alternative to the main streamway, with half way along it the Monkey Puzzle itself, a short length of extremely convoluted passage that took a lot of getting into and even more getting out of. The second bout produced a whole complex of passages, also leading off from Doubting Castle, but running 'downstream', roughly parallel with the entrance series. This is Quickmud Series; its delights include a horrible squeeze where one is virtually submerged in liquid mud (Glutination Squirm), and more tottering boulder ruckles, as well as the odd place where one can stand up. A strange echo of Eller Beck Head was the number of flies on the walls, but these were dead and covered in mould. At the very end of Quickmud Series is a particularly cruel piece of cave, a boulder choke with roots growing through it; what sounded like running water turned out to be the sound of the wind blowing outside (the survey shows this choke is very close to the entrance). So near and yet so far; there was no way out except back through all the horrors.
The end result of our labours was a cave pushed to the magic length of 2,000 feet (610 metres doesn't sound half as impressive). Perhaps a truer impression of the nature of such a place could be arrived at by multiplying its length by a measure of difficulty or unpleasantness; Keldheads would then rank high indeed!
If the cave stream really does come from Apedale, then there is the beguiling prospect of thousands of further metres of painful passage. One hope that the nature of the passage might change is seen in the occasional severe floods that burst from the entrance, suggesting that, in very wet conditions, the cave acts as an overflow for another subterranean streamway that normally debouches elsewhere (presumably frome one of the old mines in the woods nearer Preston-under-Scar). If one can force the final shaly bedding through to the junction with this putative water route, then there might be a rather more commodious cave system.
10. WINDYPITS AND WHINSTONE: NORTH-EAST YORKSHIRE
Windypits are different. Their passages don't look like those of conventional limestone caves; instead, they are usually smooth-walled rifts, opened up by rock movements rather than the slow action of water. The walls may show 'fit features', such as a small ledge on one corresponding to a little overhang on the other; floors and roofs are usually of wedged boulders. Technically these caves are 'slip' or 'tectonic' rifts, examples of which occur in many parts of the country, and in many different rock types. Slip rifts usually occur near the top of valley-side slopes, and are formed by masses of rock splitting away on joints, and moving downwards and outwards towards the valley. In the Ryedale area of North-East Yorkshire such holes are formed by the movement of blocks of the sandy Corallian limestone, which slide on the underlying Oxford Clay. They have the local name of 'windypits', because of their tendency to emit strong draughts, sometimes in the form of great gusts; in winter the warm air puffing out of them is said to have been seen forming great plumes of water vapour, as if a giant steam engine was working underground.
Little wonder these strange holes in the ground have attracted man's attention from as early a date as around 2000 BC, when archaeological evidence shows that local inhabitants were descending windypits to light fires, cook meals, and bury their dead. There had been various 'digs' underground, but the only detailed study of the holes themselves had been published in Cave Science in 1950, prior to much of this archaeological work, and was clearly out of date.
The first windypit we had a good look at, in 1972 was Ashberry, on a hill overlooking the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. Here was a hole quite different to most Dales potholes, in the middle of a wood, just a yawning black hole under a tree like a huge fox earth, all dead leaves and dank breath. Another smaller hole alongside was Ashberry II, where we had heard a local archaeological group had dug into an extensive series of 'new' passages and chambers. We found both holes to consist of a bewildering maze of rifts and chambers; in places three parallel rifts had opened up, with lots of precariously poised boulders; at the lowest point in Ashberry II a strong draught blew in from an impassable fissure, the Windlet. Surveying the complex was not easy, and drawing out the survey so that it made sense to the beholder even more difficult, as there were several superimposed levels of passages. Some years later the Cave Rescue Organisation were called to Ashberry and went in clutching our survey, which I don't think really helped them; fortunately the missing cavers were (quite predictably) simply lost, and were easily retrieved.
The three largest windypits, Antofts, Bucklands, and Slip Gill, lay in Duncombe Park, nearer Helmsley, and we were unable to obtain permission to visit them until 1981 when Dr Roger Cooper, who was working for the Nature Conservancy, was concerned to assess whether they merited being scheduled as 'key sites' of special geological interest, worthy of special conservation.
Roger was also a moldywarp, and had little difficulty recruiting a survey team from other members of the group who had never had the chance to visit these unusual caves; the team included Kevin Solman from Hull (our East Yorkshire specialist) the indefatigable Arthur Champion, and Robin Sermon, whose parents loaned us their cottage near Helmsley. We also recruited Steve Pierpoint, an archaeologist from Sheffield University, to advise on any relics found.
Buckland's Windypit (named after a famous geologist of the early 19th century) was the most impressive. Some windypits are simply straight lengths of rift, the product of a single rock movement, but Buckland's Windypit was anything but simple. It had been produced by the end of a valley-side spur simply 'falling apart' on a complex of joints, producing rifts running in all directions. It was much more extensive than the 1950 survey showed, but before we could survey it we were pulled up by a typical cave obstacle, a defunct sheep in the ripest state of decomposition possible, stuck half way down a narrow climb just inside the entrance. There was no way down the windypit without intimate contact with it. In another place we might have said 'come back a year later', but we only had one week to explore and survey the cave. A drastic solution was called for; we raced back to Helmsley, and bought a flagon of industrial-strength domestos. Kevin did the pouring, then we dragged him out of the hole as it blew eye-watering clouds of the essence of a thousand public swimming baths. Two hours later we gingerly returned, to only the barest odour of chlorine, and the sheep reduced to bleached bones. It is not a technique to recommend - the effects on cave fauna and flora do not bear thinking about - but it worked.
Bones of a more interesting type came our way in Slip Gill Windypit; Steve found what he identified as two human femurs on the debris pile at the foot of the 23 m entrance pitch. In 1955 evidence of a Bronze Age burial in the form of a beaker had been found on a ledge half way down the pitch; this precarious eyrie, which would have needed some form of rope or ladder to reach, may have been the site of several burials; later collapse cast most of the human remains into the depths below. We surveyed the cave, and found a very tight fissure, previously unexplored, leading into a new series of rifts and pitches. Finally we packed up everything, and set about getting people and gear up the main ladder pitch. Back on the surface it was time for dinner, which was when we found that the bones had inadvertently been put into the same box as the sandwiches...
The third 'big' windypit, Antofts, gave us an alarming indication that windypit formation is not a thing of the distant past. The main rift, with stalactite flows on its walls, seemed fairly ancient, but at the far end was a cross rift with lots of fallen rock that felt quite different; on either side of its entrance was jagged broken calcite, looking as if had been shattered very recently, geologically speaking at least. 'Geologically recent' is of course not necessarily 'recent' in human terms, but the cross rift did suggest that large-scale rock movements were continuing. A year, ten or a hundred years ago? it was impossible to tell. In the main rift, looking at the calcite walls, you realise that they are rather battered covered by scars and scratches, as if someone had been banging indiscriminately with a hammer. Then it dawned what we were looking at; the damage had been done by falling rocks, lots of them, the rocks that now formed the floor. What seems to happen is that windypits widen in fits and starts, presumably when there are minor earth tremors; the rift has only to open a centimetre or so, and dozens of the rocks which are jammed in it will be released to come crashing down. Whilst England is pretty stable from a seismic point of view, we still have earth tremors, every few years; they may be barely felt on the surface, but heaven help any windypit explorer who happens to be underground at the time.
The North York Moors offer a variety of other types of holes in the ground as well as windypits. Along the southern margin of the moors, where their rivers flow out into the broad Vale of Pickering, there is some genuine limestone. In dry weather most of the rivers flowing south off the Moors sink in their beds for some distance. Few caves are currently known; the longest is Kirkdale Cave, famous last century for the discovery of Pleistocene animal remains, but now largely scraped bare of archaeological deposits. Surveying its warren of muddy hands-and-knees crawls was one of Graham Steven's projects carried out on a series of evening trips; more recently a report in the Cave Diving Group newsletter tells of a sump being dived, and a dry passage beyond ending too tight where an underground stream was audible. This worried us; we had never found anything that could be remotely described as a sump! We went back, and still couldn't find one... the mystery remains. However, a few miles further east, at Bog Hall Rising, just beyond Kirkbymoorside, we did find one powerful rising where the River Dove resurged, but could not find any dry cave passage nearby. For once we regretted not having any cave divers in the group; later on, Scunthorpe Cave Club, who did have some, got through two 9 metre sumps and found 200 metres of river passage ending where the river welled up out of a deep flooded shaft. This remains the only 'active' cave known in North East Yorkshire.
The Moors can also offer the speleologist-turned-industrial-archaeologist entertainment in the form of a variety of old mines. These come in quite a number of types and forms. In the north of the area, in Cleveland, there are extensive mines for ironstone, the principal impetus towards the 19th century development of Middlesbrough and what is now Teesside. Some were worked until the middle of the present century; they are extensive, complex and generally unsafe. On a smaller scale there are mines for the semi-precious stone jet, specimens of which (along with the ubiquitous local ammonite fossils) are available from a dozen gift shops in Whitby. Also unique to the area, and on a rather larger scale, were workings for alum. This is a double sulphate of aluminium with either potassium or ammonia, giving its name to the Alum Shales of the Upper Lias. Alum was worked both opencast and underground; first found in Cleveland around 1600, it was of great importance in the tanning of leather and the dyeing of textiles. The last alum mines closed in the 1870s, victim of newer and cheaper processes (such as one utilising waste shales from collieries).
One of the last alum mines to close was Kettleness, at the east end of Runswick Bay; although the mine was worked until 1871, the village associated with it had fallen into the sea one Sunday evening earlier in the century (fortunately when most of the villagers were in the chapel, a little further inland). Cliff erosion has left the entrances to the Kettleness alum mines stranded on a ledge now reached only by a cautious slither down a shale scree; one must guard against a slither too far, as the scree debouches into empty space 30 metres vertically above the foreshore. The mines are not extensive, but have glittering black stalactites and sparkling alum crystals everywhere (I once took lots of photographs here, with Elaine posing with a forced smile in waist-deep icy water, only to find that evening that there had been no film in the camera). In a gully a short distance further along the cliffs was another old mine where we encountered a mysterious phenomenon, as yet unexplained. At the entrance one could hear a faint thumping or beating noise, as if from a underground waterfall. Walking into the passage, the thumping merged into a dull continuous roaring - and then, after a little over 30 metres, the passage ended in a solid rock 'forehead'; the entire passage had been in solid rock, with no sign at all of where the mysterious noise emanated.
Probably the most spectacular mine in the North York Moors is of quite another sort; this is Sil Howe, near Goathland, where the whinstone dyke, which cuts across the northern part of the Moors, was worked for road stone. A dyke is a vertical wedge of igneous rock, intruded after the sedimentary strata had been laid down. Graham's mid-week surveying team had a series of fruitful evenings here, finally covering around 3500 metres of passage. The line of the dyke across the moor is marked by a long trench-like line of quarries, older than the underground workings. The way in to the mine was an old airshaft in the bottom of one of the quarries, which in winter blasts out so much warm air that, as with the windypits, a vapour plume rises above it. The small stream that cascades down the steeply-sloping passage gives the place a remarkably cave-like feel; less natural were dozens of old tyres which had been dumped into the entrance nd had bounced and rolled hundreds of metres down the slope. Eventually the sloping shaft drops into huge gloomy galleries following the dykes; often there are two parallel tunnels, separated only by a 3 metre-thick rock wall, with occasional ramps rising to communicate with two or three upper levels of similarly spacious passages. During the last phase of working of the mine, in some places the rock partitions dividing the galleries were blasted out, to produce vast caverns. Despite the fact that the mine is relatively recent - it was worked between 1899 and 1950 - there are many formations, including stalactites of iron ore so soft that they swung when you blew on them. Eventually a neatly-arched level turns away from the line of the dyke, and provides a straight forward walk towards an eye of daylight 600 metres away; probably the easiest mile-long through-trip in the country. It is easy to see why there have been proposals to open the system to the public; as yet these have come to nothing.
Old mines anywhere have their special dangers; we surveyed another dyke mine at Lease Rigg where the whinstone was in a much more shattered condition, and there were frequent roof falls, completely sealing off access to a former low-level drainage adit. There were further dyke workings near Great Ayton, beneath the well-known Roseberry Topping, 'the Matterhorn of Cleveland'; some of these had local names such as 'Elephant Hole' and 'The Blue Lagoon'. Sadly these mines have suffered the usual fate of interesting holes in the ground close to large centres of population (in this case, Teesside); non-cavers have ventured down them, had accidents, and, in the cause of protecting people from themselves, the local authorities have filled them in.
11. SWALEDALE AGAIN : THE CLIFF FORCE BREAKTHROUGH
Most cavers, if they stick with their pursuit for a few years, have one moment that is especially their own, one little piece of caving history that unspools from the reel with their name on it. That moment came for Chris Langthorne at Late Summer Bank Holiday in 1976; the place was Cliff Force Cave and the event the realisation of the hottest caving potential in Swaledale.
Cliff Force had attracted cavers' attention for years. It is rather unusual in being a waterfall that falls from nowhere; the water spouts straight from the ground and cascades away down the valley; generations of tourists, stopping at the Buttertubs Pass (see chapter 7) to buy an ice-cream and gawp at the range of open potholes beside the road, must have turned their eyes briefly across the narrow valley of Cliff Beck and wondered where the cascade on the opposite slope was coming from. The water appears from a limestone scree, below a small and shattered scar. Before its reappearance there, it has spent some time underground; Dr Jack Myers of the Northern Pennine Club had put fluorescein down a sink at Sargill (on the Wensleydale side of the surface watershed) in April 1959, and the green water had reappeared at Cliff Force two days later. Several other sinks in the same general area were thought to feed the rising; here was potential for a major cave system. The NPC realised this, and put in an awful lot of effort digging at the scree slope in the early 1960s. They were rewarded with a cave system of sorts, with 120 m of varied passage, but nowhere did they find the main stream; at one point running water could be heard down narrow fissures, but despite much digging, and some chemical persuasion, they could not reach it. Frustrated, they abandoned their assault.
The Moldywarps had glanced at Cliff Force a few times, and fantasised about the cave that must lie behind it. One passage in the cave led to what seemed to be a sump. The August Bank Holiday weekend in 1976 was hot and dry, and it seemed a good time to check sumps, just is case they weren't sumps after all. Chris, East Yorkshireman Kevin Solman, Elaine and myself entered the cave on the Saturday morning. The water level was low, and the sump, as we had hoped, didn't exist - but the low crawl that had been revealed by its departure pinched out after 10 m. However, nearby there was a dry high-level passage we had never properly looked at. 40 metres long, it wound round a few corners to end in a total choke of small boulders. This didn't look terribly promising - but I noticed that the steam from our breath was being drawn into the boulders. Interesting! Pulling out a few boulders increased the draught, which sucked powerfully into the choke. Chris took over; he liked attacking piles of rocks, as it was a good variant on rugby, which at one stage he had once played for his county; little did he know it but he was about to be awarded his cap (or rather, helmet) in the field of single-handed combat with boulder chokes.
Elaine and I then slunk off, leaving the grunting, thumps and occasional rumble that marked the continuing assault; Kevin lay at Chris's feet and stacked the boulders passed back to him. We heard the remainder of the story when we met up again that evening. The choke had put up a sporting fight, but it was really a one-sided contest; after two hours a black space had appeared, and Chris lunged forwards, ignoring a shower of smaller boulders, to emerge jubilant into a 3-metre high passage. Excited exploration ensued, of walking-sized passages (far superior to anything yet seen in the cave) including an entertaining traverse above a deep pool, and a large passage that ran round in a complete circle. They still had not met the main stream, but the place was too complicated to claim they had seen all of it.
On Monday morning the four or us were back. We arrived early, so early that the car park beside the Buttertubs was completely empty. Quickly entering the cave, we romped past the ex-choke into the new passages; they were certainly quite confusing, but at one point I found a junction where Saturday's footprints turned left but on the right, behind a big boulder, was an equally large passage with an undisturbed mud floor. It ran gently downhill - and then came the moment we had been waiting for. Before us lay the main stream, flowing gently towards us in a tunnel 5 metres wide and 2 metres high.
Taking turns to be leader, we jubilantly raced upstream through a winding gallery, with occasional avens and rifts in the roof. After about 300 m the character of the passage began to change, as the roof lowered, and fallen boulders became more frequent. Finally we were forced down to hands-and-knees, and met a choke. There was roaring water somewhere ahead, through boulders - was this to be the end? Then we noticed, on the left, an opening in the roof, corked up by a large boulder sitting directly beneath it, like an inverted trapdoor. It was another job for Chris; back against one wall, feet on the boulder, and it soon slid aside, exposing a chimney; this led up into a little crawl - and then, draughty darkness. We had emerged into the largest chamber in any Swaledale Cave, 15 metres wide, long, and high. Shining our lamps up through a fine mist of spray, we saw the stream cascading down from a yawning 3 metre-diameter tube half way up the far wall of the chamber; far above were hanging boulders, and vivid green staining from copper minerals in the geological fault on which the cavern had formed.
Elaine took over the lead; the next 200 metres of passage ('The Drain Queen's Highway') were a delight, a phreatic tunnel with tiers of rock shelves on either side, and displays of spectacular eroded fossils standing proud of the walls. The stream flowed slowly, with occasional deep pools that provided some amusing moments when encountered. Then, all of a sudden, the passage closed down to a duck. Retracing our steps for a short distance, we found a dry ox-bow on the left which provided a hands-and-knees crawl that by-passed the duck, and led to more 3 metre-high streamway.
This time the floor was strewn with fallen slabs, and as we went on, signs of collapse became more evident as the passage widened into a big bedding chamber. The roof was formed by a blocky shale band we had first seen high in the walls of Fault Hall; here great slabs of it were hanging, apparently ready to fall at a whisper; the floor was piled with slabs that had already dropped. We dubbed this ominous place 'The Room of Dangling Doom'; one did not feel like spending too long there. We poked around in one or two corners, but could not see any obvious way on.
We returned, elated, back down the long stream passage and out through the complexities of the entrance series to a hot and sunny afternoon. Outside, humanity was much more in evidence - tourists were out in force. Clambering up the steep valley side toward the cars, we met a National Park Warden, who we told our story (or a precised version of it) to, and asked to take our photograph. This he did. Then back to the cars to get changed - and the car park was chock full; the ice cream vendor had parked right beside us. Getting changed after caving provides some memorable moments, but none more so than this, four dripping and bemuddied cavers surrounded by a serpentine queue of gawping visitors - and then we heard the warden, delivering an impromptu lecture to the hordes...'these people have just found a new cave'. The dizzy delights of fame; how to preserve one's modesty with a towel whilst fielding such erudite questions as 'is it dark down there? aren't you afraid of getting lost? and the inevitable 'well I think you're crazy to go down place like that'. It was a bizarre but fitting end to the day.
But we hadn't got to the end of the cave. Later in the week we attacked with another weapon, this time Graham Stevens and his crowbar, but the tottering chokes of the Room of Dangling Doom failed to yield. Even bigger guns were brought in- no less than Martin Davies and the Brook Brothers. That was enough for the choke; it gave in, only to yield the unpleasant Killer Crawl, a bouldery struggle for another hundred metres, dropping back to the stream, which promptly emerged from a sump.
Undeterred by this unfriendly end, Chris and Graham kept up the pressure on the cave throughout the autumn; over 1500 metres of passage were surveyed, and digging started in the stream bed to lower the level of the final sump. On New Year's Day 1977, a freeze-up having lowered the stream level further, the duo made 8 metres of progress into the sump to find an airbell. Then in March we brought in a real cave-diver, Paul (Sprack) Atkinson; he dived 6 metres to a second airbell, then another 6 metres and he was through, into continuing streamway, low and wide with many boulders lurking underwater to trip the explorer. In May the sump was passed again, with a second diver, George Bee, joining the team; Graham (having been practising in the swimming baths) made his first cave dive. The watery Aquablunder Way ended in drier going (Boulder Highway) but after another hundred metres or so this dropped down to the stream again, and Sump Two was soon reached.
We still had hopes of further progress; in July a renewed dig at Sump One dropped the water level sufficiently to convert in into a long duck, so diving gear was no longer needed. Eleven months after our discovery, Paul Atkinson made the first dive in Sump Two, but it was made of sterner stuff than its predecessor; the floor was solid rock (so the water level could not be lowered), and the sump continued thoroughly sumped as a low and wide bedding obstructed by sand banks.
Survey showed the cave to be trending east-south-east, making very little progress in the direction of the Sargill sinks; we can only have explored, and the very most, a quarter of the passage length in the full system. Since the first exploration, the shattered shale band that dogs the cave beyond Fault Hall is still making following the streamway a serious business. Pete Roe, by dint of some serious diving, has made a total of 250 to 300 metres more progress, involving three more sumps interspersed by low and boulder-cluttered passages. This long and shattered section of passage is running along the strike of the gently-dipping limestone; hopes are that the character of the cave will change abruptly for the better when it turns, as it must, up-dip to head towards the sinks. Then there will be an awful lot of cave to explore; the carrot still dangles.
In 1980 Craven Pothole Club party spotted a high level passage leading off Fault Hall above the downstream passage, which yielded the Spar Shop Series, high-level passages which almost link through to the maze in the Entrance Series. Pete Roe has also found another high-level route, Orange Egg Passage, opening off Shower Chamber, another part of the Maze, reached by a scramble up boulders just past our initial dig.
The Maze looks quite simple on the survey (nothing like the labyrinths of Devis Hole and Windegg Mine Caverns), but as Chris and Kevin found out on that first trip in 1976, it is horribly easy to walk round and round in circles. Just how easy we found out sixteen years later, on 30th May 1992.
A sizeable gathering of Moldywarps was taking place at the Punchbowl Inn, Low Row, billed as a 'freshwarp' weekend, to introduce moldywarp offspring to the delights of the underworld. The 'advanced' group (a couple of teenagers, already fairly seasoned cavers) were taken into Cliff Force, where, as they exited, they met a pair of cavers on their way in. Friendly greetings were exchanged, and they thought no more of it.
The day's exertions over, mature and fresh warps all returned to the Punchbowl, and were just settling down to a nostalgic slide-show when the police called - a Cave Rescue callout had gone out, for two lads from Leeds who had not contacted their homes when they had said they would; their car had been spotted in the car park on the Buttertubs Pass.....
There was a general scrabble for caving gear by the fitter and more able-bodied, and a race up the Dale to the Pass. The day had been fine, but now the weather was growing threatening; the sky had clouded over, and there was the odd flash of lightning. and distant growls of thunder. We knew parts of Cliff Force could flood badly; the missing cavers could be anywhere, even up at the far end beyond the duck that used to be Sump One, where they could easily be trapped. An advance party of four were dispatched underground; the rest of us awaited further instructions - but after only twenty minutes or so, lights reappeared across the valley - six (one very dim), not four. A shout went across "is it stand-down?" and the answer echoed back "stand down"; it was quite a dramatic moment, and brought relief all round.
The missing duo had simply been unable to find their way out of the Maze, having walked round and round in circles; tiring, and with one light almost out, they had sensibly wrapped themselves in an exposure blanket, and settled down to wait. Cave rescues don't come much easier than this. The press reported that the rescuees had been taken to hospital for a check up; as usual, they got it wrong - they simply came back to the pub with us for a hot meal and a good night's sleep. But it certainly added some spice to the evening. Cliff Force is not one of the hardest caves in the Dales, but it has its hazards.
12. ANGELS AND DEVILS IN EDEN: THE CAVES OF STENKRITH PARK
Caves, at any rate active stream caves, are often not very healthy places to be in wet weather. If one does find oneself in such an environment, one of the easier things to do, but not always one of the wisest, is to go with the flow - downstream. I learned this in August 1982 in the Angel's Drainpipe, a new - or at any rate relatively unknown - cave near Kirkby Stephen.
The Angel's Drainpipe is unusual in several ways. For a start it is not in limestone, but in a strange rock locally known as brockram. This is what geologists call a breccia, laid down in the Permian period, when the Vale of Eden was a very different place to the well-watered green valley we see today. Then the infant Pennines towered above a desert, with great fans of scree and debris spread out from the newly-uplifted mountains. The screes were of limestone fragments, but they became cemented together by a matrix of red desert sandstone. The resultant breccia, or fossil scree, contains so much calcium carbonate that it behaves like a true limestone, and allows the formation of water-worn caves.
The River Eden cuts through the brockram in a narrow and spectacular gorge, shrouded in trees and little suspected by the motorist who drives across the bridge high above it. This dramatic river scenery has prompted the creation of Stenkrith Park, on the southern outskirts of Kirkby Stephen, but its caves seem to have remained virtually unknown, except to locals; most cavers confine their attention to real limestone, and are not really aware of geological oddities like brockram. Anyway, one rarely thinks of looking for new caves in public parks.
The gorge is only short, but substantial amounts of water pass underground on both sides of the surface river. One cave on the west, the Devil's Grinding Mill, attracts the attention of even the most casual visitor to the park. It presumably gains its name from the thundering of water audible within; when we surveyed it in 1975 there were three separate entrances, as well as others that were choked by flood debris. It is a relatively easy cave, quite safe for novices (except in high water conditions) if one avoids one of the entrances which opens straight onto a deep pool in the gorge. In 1975 we surveyed the Grinding Mill, and found the smaller but equally sporting Millrace Cave directly across the gorge.
Then in June 1982 Moldywarp geologist Roger Cooper called in at Stenkrith Park, and noticed, cunningly concealed by some bushes, a rising, with two cave entrances. We had missed this on our 1975 visit, although it lay only a short distance downstream of the Devil's Grinding Mill. A few weeks I struggled into my elderly wetsuit (whilst Roger played the role of spectator) and opted for the more comfortable of the two entrances, which provided 15 m of easy crawl to a boulder choke. The other was less inviting, a wriggle over a boulder and a drop down into waist-deep water; ahead the walls narrowed, and thin rock ledges jutted out to halt progress. However, wider spaces could be glimpsed beyond, and a distant rumble of flowing water was just audible.
A month later I was back again with Richard Gibson and Alison Buchanan. We had spent the morning being repulsed by Mousegill Cave, and felt we deserved better fortune. An attack with the lump hammer subdued the rock ledges but still left a worryingly narrow rift with deep water. Richard and I were both perfect gentlemen; Alison could go first. She did - and slid through easily; the squeeze was something of an illusion, so we both bravely followed her. The next hour was a delight; the cave went on and on. After squeezing over a few boulders and hammering away the odd ledge the going eased to straightforward wading, which then gave way to a free-flowing streamway, mostly crawling but never over tight. One narrow section opened up into a chamber with clean rock ledges flanking a rock trench through which the stream flowed. We named this Shelf Chamber; just beyond one could turn left out of the streamway into some dry side passages, where we found a second chamber with some big fallen boulders (Block Chamber); at last we could stand up. There was flood debris everywhere here, which half choked one rift through which daylight was visible. I inched forward, and found myself peeping out into the gorge, at two teenage girls sitting on a boulder, happily chatting and totally unaware of my subterranean presence. Thrusting my head into the outer world, through a veritable bird's nest of twigs and leaves, I ventured a cheery greeting, but sadly they made an immediate and precipitate departure...
We all struggled out into the sunshine, and found we had 'long-circuited' the Devil's Grinding Mill and come out in the gorge above its choked upper entrances, and above the road bridge. Richard was not been feeling well (perhaps over-excitement), so he remained outside while Alison and I went back into the cave and returned to the stream passage, setting off upstream. Crawls alternated with places where one could walk - after a fashion - until we reached what is probably the high-spot of the cave, a beautiful three-metre cascade where the stream plunges into a deep pool, in which a large salmon was swimming around. Above Fish Trap Falls was more easy crawling; daylight glimpsed through impassable rifts showed the cave was still running close to the river bank. Then the roof lowered to a bedding crawl, which seemed a good point for us to turn round, more than content with the afternoon's exploration.
A fortnight later we were back again, with surveying gear. Tom Megahy and Geoff Tryon surveyed downstream from the new entrance, and Richard and I worked our way upstream. The previous limit was easily passed, and after a short crawl we met daylight yet again, filtering in through fissures in the walls and roof. The passage ended in a flood debris choke; this was soon demolished to reveal a final exit, and this time a negotiable one, out onto the river bank, beyond the head of the gorge. Once again our emergence from the ground caused a little consternation amongst surface mortals (this time some sun-bathing tourists) but these at least did not take flight.
There were still some side passages to look at in the stream passage between the Lower and Middle Entrances. At the end of August we were back again, but this time encountered the prime hazard in Stenkrith Park Caves - high water levels. There had been heavy rain, and although the level of the Eden was clearly falling, water was spilling into the Middle Entrance. Undeterred, we crawled in, to find that most of the incoming flow was roaring away down an impassable rift on the right in Block Chamber; the main upstream passage was bringing in little more than its usual flow. Encouraged, we pressed on and Shelf Chamber was reached, and then I entered the rather narrow crawl beyond. By now there was a good flow accompanying my progress, but I didn't really notice it, as my body acted as a plug - however, after a few metres a side passage, which we had not explored, came in on the right, and brought in an absolute torrent of water (our survey later showed that this was the main flow that we had seen disappearing in Block Chamber). I was emerging head-first into a rift 1.2 metres high with a metre of racing water; it was like entering a water turbine. Going downstream, fast, would have been only too easy - return would have been impossible, and drowning a near-certainty. The only thing to do was to turn round; easier said than done! The crawl was too narrow, so I had to extrude myself into the rift, and turn round whilst clinging like grim death to the walls. And then came the narrow crawl back to Shelf Chamber, this time with the stream flowing fast towards me; this was not too easy either. I still acted as a plug, but this time the stream backed up in my face instead of behind my boots. It was a very grateful caver who finally struggled out of the torrent to rejoin his comrades in Shelf Chamber.
It seemed a good idea to return to the surface, where we resorted to cave exploration by indirect means. We did this by putting fluorescein into the cave stream (Tom had a scientific bent, and enjoyed things like this). What we had not realised was the way in which the stream sub-divided both underground, and after it returned to the surface - soon there was brilliant green water everywhere, spouting out of dozens of fissures. Fortunately there were not too many visitors around to be alarmed by this further spectacle(3). All this proved that the hydrology of the Stenkrith Park brockram is more complicated than we had realised, and that there is scope for the exploration of even more cave.
The cave we had surveyed provides a sporting through trip of over 300 metres and a total length, with side passages, of 427 metres; whilst we could not claim that all of it was 'new', since the Middle and Upper entrances had only been choked by flood debris, and had clearly been open at times, it seemed unlikely that anyone had ever completed the traverse between all three entrances before. We needed a name; since far too many healthy and wholesome caves have been bestowed names linking them to the Powers of Darkness, 'the Angel's Drainpipe' redressed the balance a little. But the 'Drainpipe' element conveys a warning; the Eden can rise very suddenly, and flush through the whole cave - the omnipresent flood debris is adequate testimony of that- unless visitors wish to share an experience common to spiders in the bath, they will do well to only enter the cave in low water conditions, and in settled weather.
13. MARBLE AND WERE-GRANNIES: CAVING ON SKYE
To a real caver, anything classed as a holiday is dogged by an element of frustration unless part of it can be spent underground. Enjoying oneself totally on the surface just doesn't seem quite natural. Cavers, however, often have wives and families who do not totally share this feeling; they have preconceived ideas about holidays involving things like sunshine and fresh air. Unfortunate tensions can result, unless some sort of venue can be arranged that offers the potential for attractive pursuits both above and below ground.
The Isle of Skye proves an ideal solution to this problem. The serrated ridge of the Black Cuillin provides arguably the most spectacular mountain scenery in the British Isles, and the indented coastline is dramatic and varied; yet there is also limestone, and caves. Prior to the 1970s these caves were not well known. The first thing I found was a brief note in a Northern Pennine Club newsletter referring to some short systems; one they had left unexplored, on the quite reasonable grounds that it was 'wet'. That was sufficient excuse for an investigation.
My first trip was in September 1968 with Dave Atkings, a loyal fringe moldywarp; Dave was an invaluable aid to the group, attending functions, providing transport, fixing our cars and motorbikes when they went wrong - but he rarely ventured underground, perhaps because he was working for the National Coal Board and saw enough subterranean things in the course of his employment. We made the long drive north in Dave's elderly Morris Cowley, and camped on the superb foreshore at Camas Malag. Dave sat on the beach in his folding deckchair and listened to the radio; I went looking for caves.
I soon found the NPC's wet sink, only a short walk along the track. A stream cascaded over an igneous dyke into a limestone sinkhole, and flowed into a low entrance. It was not only wet, but enlivened by broken glass, oil drums, and two decomposing sheep (why is it that caves, even in the most beautiful and unspoiled landscapes, tend to have the dual function of human dustbin and ovine mortuary even when there isn't a house for miles?). Nevertheless, I crawled in, and found what, apart from the mess, would have been a most attractive passage, dropping down little cascades and winding round bends to a stretch where one could even stand up!. Then I realised the folly of going underground alone - my lamp suddenly began to fade. As I envisaged the problems of a retreat (and of feeling my way round a defunct sheep) I saw a glimmer of light ahead; there was a lower entrance. It took an ear-in-the-water crawl to get to it, but I thankfully emerged into the bracken, only to find the stream doing something that turned out to be very typical of the Skye limestone outcrops. It emerged onto the surface for only a few metres, flowing over another igneous dyke, before plunging underground again, this time down a pothole that would have needed a ladder. Nearby was yet another hole, with more rubbish; gingerly crawling across a pile of rusty saw blades (!) I found a dry passage slanting down to the base of the pothole, but the stream disappeared under boulders and rubbish. Undeterred, I returned to the surface, and found the eventual rising of the stream, on a ledge just below the edge of the sea cliffs. An easy scramble gained a walking-sized stream passage that took me to where dim daylight filtered down from the hole with the rusty saw blades; I had followed the entire underground course of the stream, in three separate sections.
Camas Malag Cave (which later survey showed to contain over 250 metres of passage) was a good introduction to the caves of the Beinn an Dubhaich area. Beinn an Dubhaich itself is an unassuming hill of granite, thrust up through Cambrian limestones, which dip away from the hill to the north and south. Numerous streams flow down from the higher ground, and sink on reaching the limestone, or rather the marble into which it has been baked by the heat of the granite intrusion. The soluble rock is shot through with so many insoluble igneous dykes that the streams are forced to surface again and again, as at Camas Malag. Some stream gullies contain five or six successive caves.
We made visit after visit to Skye. The Grampian Speleological Group joined in too, and then the University College of London Speleo Society. Between us we ended up with fifty or sixty caves. Only two (to date) exceeded the magic thousand foot/300 metre mark, but they make up for lack of length in variety, spectacular passage forms (the rifts cut in banded marble are a speciality) and interesting little technical problems.
Our most important find, and one that even, for a while, received the accolade (from the Grampian Speleo Group!) of "the finest cave in Scotland", was Valley Head Cave, or Uamh Cinn Ghlinn. (It is only right to gaelicise the names of new caves; clutching notebook and pencil, we sought the advice of the local postman. The name of one small cave, Uamh na Bocsa Leitranaheachin or 'Letter-Box Cave' threatened to exceed its length, unless the survey was reproduced at an unusually large scale).
The exploration of Valley Head Cave commenced at Easter 1971. This was the first proper Moldywarp visit to the area, by Colin Carson, Chris Langthorne and myself. We had spent the morning pottering along the Allt nan Leac valley, on the south flank of Beinn an Dubhaich. At the head of the valley we found a long cliff with a resurgence at its foot; a quarter of a mile beyond was a sinkhole taking a sizeable stream. The sink to resurgence distance was a long one, by Skye standards, but neither end looked easily enterable. Colin and Chris were suffering temptation by the omnipresent mountains; at lunchtime they headed off to attempt a Cuillin, leaving me to potter. I returned to the resurgence at the foot of the cliff, which welled up from a pile of boulders; I started hitting the boulders with my geological hammer, to relieve frustration as much as anything. Rather surprisingly, the boulders disintegrated with ease, and after an hour or so of work I had opened a black hole. I was on my own, but I had to take a look...
Crawling in, I found myself in a beautiful tubular passage in clean limestone, half full of clear green water. It was an easy if wet crawl, and it wound away into the darkness. I fired up by carbide lamp, and cautiously wallowed in. With the emerald water and the symmetrical white vault of the roof it was irresistible, even by Skye standards. It was also very cold; my wet suit was back at the tent. About 30 metres in, and round two or three corners, the water started to deepen, and then the walls abruptly closed in. I peered through a narrow gap, glimpsing wider passage beyond, and then I heard a distant rumble of free-flowing water; memories went back to Smeltmill Beck Cave four years earlier. I felt around underwater; there was plenty of room there, it was only a short duck.... There was only one thing for it. There was enough room above water for one arm, and the hand clutching the carbide lamp; the rest of me would have to go under.
The plunge was swift, and really quite easy. I emerged spluttering into more roomy surroundings, and a chamber where I could stand up; opening off it was a beautiful circular cavern with a big dry passage coming in 3 metres up one wall. The stream entered the first chamber from a hands-and-knees crawl which looked as if it should 'go' as well. I had found a major cave - and all at once I felt appallingly remote. Solo exploration through ducks, on a carbide lamp, is not really a wise idea, especially when nobody knows that the cave you are in even exists!
Shivering and chastened, I made the return trip (reflecting that, had an observer been present, the hand-and-carbide-lamp arising from the water must have looked like a strange variant on the theme of the presentation of Excalibur by the Lady of the Lake). Next day Colin and Chris, in wet suits, surveyed the new cave, finding the streamway ended in a sump; they too thought that solitary exploration of such a place was an exceedingly silly thing to do.
The next act in the drama came with the University College of London students visiting Skye in 1972. They opened up a hole in the dry valley just below the stream sink, and explored both upstream and downstream passages, the former connecting with the sinkhole via a tight duck. Downstream the passage sumped, but there was a tight high-level route. Nev Andrews and myself had a look at this at Easter 1973; in the downstream direction it passed over the sump, but got too tight just where we could hear the stream ahead.
Despite this frustration, the Valley Head system stayed in our minds. Two years passed until Easter 1975, when I was back yet again, with Graham Stevens and Kev Solman. Graham was the obvious choice for an investigation of the downstream sump; this wasn't really very fair, from the sump's point of view; it succumbed immediately. He wallowed in, and vanished. Seconds later his light reappeared shining back through a tiny chink of airspace - despite appearances, it was not a real sump at all, simply a duck formed by a typical Skye obstacle, a wall-like feature formed by an impervious igneous dyke crossing the passage. Graham scrabbled away at a gravel bank holding back the pool, and a much more comfortable airspace developed. We followed him through, to the best hour of cave exploration Skye has ever given us. The passage went on and on, curving down a series of cascades (dubbed the Spiral Staircase), through crawls (one over razor-sharp fretted limestone named 'The Spiky Hassocks'), to a tall chamber with a huge hanging boulder in the roof. Beyond the roof lowered, and after a crawl over boulders, we reached a real sump. We surveyed back out, having found 160 metres of new passage.
The survey was eagerly plotted; how far was the new sump from that which terminated the resurgence cave (Lower Valley Head Cave) we had explored in 1971? . The answer was around 20 metres. A through-trip from sink to resurgence is a caver's dream, rarely realised in the Pennines but more common here on Skye. The same trio were back a year later, entering the lower cave. A brief attack on boulder chokes in the high-level passages failed, and we were forced back to the sump. Again we dug in the stream bed to drop the water level - and a chink of draughting airspace appeared. Graham needed no further encouragement; he felt around underwater and then dived. The airspace was too small to use, but the underwater passage was spacious; the sump was only a metre long, and opened into a low canal. Ploughing on upstream, the explorer came to another low airspace, even shorter than the first - and beyond he crawled over boulders, and emerged in a familiar high chamber with a dangling boulder. Our dig had lowered the water level in both sumps; we had made the link with the upper cave.
So Lower Valley Head Cave and Upper Valley Head Cave were no more, we simply had Valley Head Cave, almost 400 metres of splendid sporting cave, accessible all the way from sink to resurgence.
A chapter like this cannot hope to cover all the limestone caves of Skye, but a few more deserve a passing mention. Not all the caves we found were in the Cambrian limestones around Beinn an Dubhaich. In 1973 John and Marilyn Longstaff had camped with us, but had restricted themselves to enjoying the delights of Skye above ground level. Walking down the remote Allt na Pairte valley to the deserted crofting settlement of Boreraig, they did notice a waterfall apparently disappearing into a sinkhole. The geological map showed this area as undifferentiated 'Jurassic strata', with a note saying these included some limestones. It was 1978 before we returned, to find that there was indeed a cave, about 200 metres long, with a short ladder pitch at the entrance and a variety of passage types; there were also some unique 'pebble-column' features which we surmised had been produced by a drip from a stalactite cementing together pebbles in a gravel floor, then the floor being washed away, except for the cemented columns of pebbles. The cave could be followed to within 50 metres of its rising; near the rising was a dry cave, draughting strongly, which we pushed for 15 metres - then noticed the claw prints in the floor and the litter of animal bones all round.
Cavers occasionally have nose-to-nose encounters with the animal denizens of caves; we once met a fox in Jacob's Well Cave (near Frosterley in Weardale), which seemed primarily concerned with forsaking our company. Others have told tales of glimpsing the black-and-white striped muzzle of a badger, and retreating. One suspects a Skye wildcat would perhaps be the least amicable of all native cave-dwelling mammals towards a caver unwittingly grovelling into its lair; we debated the prospect of digging whilst holding an open tin of Jellymeat Whiskas in one hand, calling 'here kitty kitty kitty', but decided against it; retreat was deemed, in these circumstances, excusable.
One cave on Skye demonstrated the disadvantages of caving in parties. This was Vampire Cave, a strange little sinkhole in a patch of limestone away from the main area. The Grampian Speleo Group had found it in the summer of 1978, and had explored 6 metres of smallish passage, retreating (wisely!) where the passage narrowed to a tight and jagged crawl; its 'teeth' gave the cave its name. We treated their report as a challenge; in October of the same year Arthur Champion was inveigled into the hole (whilst I waited at the entrance) and soon reappeared, declaring the unexplored passage "big enough to take your granny down". Not wishing to be considered an inferior grade of speleologist to Arthur's grandparents, I followed him in. The passage was tight, sharp, and convoluted. After about 25 metres of painful progress Arthur arrived at a bend not even he could get round. We tried to re-arrange ourselves to survey back to the entrance; this meant Arthur had to retreat and pass me, a manoeuvre that caused a serious problem, as the passage was on the very limit of sufficiency to accommodate two parallel cavers. This gave us some time to contemplate techniques the Cave Rescue Organisation might have developed to deal with people-chokes (larger-scale examples are becoming a hazard in well-populated caves in places like Mendip and Derbyshire), but happily we freed ourselves from the mutual constriction and struggled back to daylight. The logbook records 'not a place to revisit, even for were-grannies'.
If the hazards of caving as a duo and the rewards of solo ventures underground have featured heavily in this chapter, let it close on a salutary note with the story of the Cave of the Seed (Uamh an T-Sill). This lies in the Coille Gaireallach woodland on the north flank of Beinn an Dubhaich and seems to be the only limestone cave on Skye known in local folklore; rather confusingly it has three names, the others being 'Cave of the Fairies' and 'Skeleton Cave'. The last was bestowed on it by the Grampian lads who beat us to 'finding' it by a couple of weeks, in 1973. It is a fairly short and spacious cave, with roomy passages opening from an open pothole, two leading to further entrances. The GSG dug out a tight crawl from the open pot, to enter a little conical chamber. The only other way into this was though a hole in the centre of the roof, 3 metres above; this was interesting, but their attention was diverted by the fact that a human skull was grinning up at them from a pile of bones on the floor. As responsible citizens they informed the police; the local policeman duly cycled up from Broadford, took one look down the cave, and said 'I'm nae goin doon there'. The cavers then retrieved the skull, and presented him with it; he bicycled back down to Broadford with it in his saddle bag. I don't know whether any more was ever heard of it, except that it was believed to be 'of some age'.
The most likely assumption seems to be that the remains were of a solitary explorer of a previous generation. He or she must have found the top end of the little conical chamber (as we did when surveying the cave) in an alcove just off to one side of an easy passage linking two of the entrances of the cave. Looking down, the chamber floor doesn't seem far below, an easy jump - but once down escape would have been quite impossible, as the smooth walls overhung all round. It was a natural version of a feature medieval lords sometimes equipped their castles with, a bottle dungeon, or an 'oubliette'..... No, solo caving is rarely a good idea.
14. THE COLLAPSING HOTEL AND DEATH-TRAP HOLE: IRELAND
A thirty-seater coach bearing an ebullient and noisy wedding party winds its way down the drive to the hotel where the reception is being held. Pulling into the forecourt, it slows in front of the white-painted Georgian facade of the old country house. Suddenly one front wheel of the coach drops abruptly, then the vehicle remains poised at a drunken angle for a long second before, in a horribly surreal manner the ground literally opens up and the coach up-ends and vanishes, the noise of its engine and the cries of its occupants drowned in a growing thunder as cracks snake outwards through the tarmac from the opening pit. As they reach the front of the house, it too cracks and a great slab of its front wall slowly telescopes downwards, leaving tilting floorboards and stranded furniture, wreathed in billowing dust, perched dizzily above the void...
This has not, thankfully, actually happened. But it might...
Ninety years ago Whitechurch House in County Waterford, in the south-east of the Republic of Ireland, was a country house, not a hotel. Here lived Lieutenant Colonel Forsayeth, who had a lively interest in archaeology. He was fortunate in being able to pursue his interest close to home; in the grounds of his house were two caves, Brothers' Cave (so-named after its discovery by his two sons) and Ooanagaloor, the 'Cave of Echoes'. After his death, and the political and social turmoil that shook Ireland in the following decades, his collection of archaeological material was broken up. Some finds made their way to the public museum in Cork, and others to University College, Dublin. A University of Bristol party re-visited the caves in 1928, and found some human skeletal fragments in Ooanagaloor.
The 'Cave of Echoes', has an unlikely entrance in a clump of trees in a field 120 m south-west of the Forsayeth residence, now the Whitechurch House Hotel, near Dungarvan in County Waterford, on the southern coast of the Republic of Ireland. The clump of trees is surrounded by a fence, easily jumped over. Jumping is not too wise, however, as within the fence the ground suddenly drops away into a quite awe-inspiring gloomy pit, to the sides of which the trees cling. It is just the sort of place Celtic mythology would see as an entry into the underworld. Actually, descent, aided by tree roots, is a simple manner in one corner, and takes one into the twilight of a huge chamber, littered with boulders. A variety of narrow rifts and low arched passages lead off.
Moldywarps first visited Ooanagaloor in September 1983. We had come to Waterford after enquiring from Irish caver (and fount-of-knowledge) Gareth Jones, which area we might do some useful work in. We were in effect looking for the 'Northern Dales of Ireland'; an area off the beaten track where caves, maybe not of any great length, might remain unsurveyed, and hopefully, ready to yield some new passage without any great expenditure of effort. Around two third of Ireland is of limestone, but there are only a few areas with lengthy caves, usually those where there is reasonable relief, and where patches of impermeable rocks provide gathering grounds for streams which can then flow onto the limestone and sink. These optimum conditions occur in Fermanagh in the North, and Clare in the South-West, but over much of the country caves are much more scattered. Gareth suggested we visit the low-lying area between Dungarvan and Cappoquin in Waterford, where a number of small caves were known. The only published accounts of these were in old archaeological journals; the caves did not seem to have been investigated by modern cavers.
For an hour or so we pottered round and surveyed a series of small passages and rifts, none taking us more than 10 or 15 metres from the twilight of the Ooanagaloor entrance chamber. Then Richard-the-ferret-Gibson disappeared through a tight squeeze over a boulder; after a few minutes his light reappeared in a quite different place, shining through a floor-level bedding plane, too low to pass, but with a soft silt floor. Half an hour of trowel work saw the rest of the party grovelling through to join him, in what was obviously a previously-unexplored series of passages; precisely what we had hoped for. The floors were all of mud, often littered with bones; chambers and bedding plane crawls alternated. We collected a few bones, including skulls of a pig and a cat; one cow bone had been sawn through, a pointer to nearby human occupation at some time.
In some of the chambers were cascades of dazzling white stalagmite, in striking contrast to the overall browness elsewhere; every so often there would be a conical funnel in the floor, dropping about 8 m to pools which we assumed were at local saturation level. Eventually, after a complicated series of crawls and squeezes, the passage gained height, and for the first time, the floor became littered with broken rocks. Picking our way over these, we noticed dozens of thin tendrils dangling from the cracked roof - tree roots. The survey later showed that we were beneath the trees lining the hotel drive. After a couple of rather shaky-looking chambers, a scree slope led up into blackness. Crawling up, we emerged on what seemed like a balcony overlooking a great gloomy void. The roof was cracked, and half-detached slabs of limestone dangled menacingly; in the air was the distinctive sulphureous smell of freshly-broken limestone. The floor of boulders was split by a chasm edged by walls of tottering ruckle, and the only possible way on was along a ledge against the left wall. Richard tiptoed along, looked back - and hurriedly returned, ashen-faced. He had realised what he had been walking over. I set out - and a huge boulder promptly shifted under my feet. A unanimous decision was made to beat a gentle and quiet retreat. We called the cavern 'Sheol', after the Hebrew abode of the dead.
That night we plotted the cave survey, which had to end, rather unusually, in two diverging dotted lines; the most spacious section of the cave had been left unexplored. Then we plotted the surface survey; this, disturbingly, showed that Sheol actually underlay the forecourt of the Hotel. Even more disturbing was the plotted longitdinal section of the cave, showing the passages in relation to the surface above. This showed the roof of the chamber (admittedly only sketched in) as a couple of metres above the level of the forecourt! As there was no cave sticking out of the ground at this point, this was clearly in error - but the forecourt did show distinct signs of cracking and subsidence. The cavern roof cannot be far beneath the surface, and it is a considerably unsupported span of badly-cracked limestone. The present entrance to the cave has been formed by a collapse of precisely the type waiting to happen here.
We returned to the cave at Easter 1988, when the intrepid John Dowds, who had joined us from Dublin, traversed Sheol by crawling round the right wall, and found that the cavern ended in a massive boulder choke.
We have twice written to the management of the hotel, with copies of our survey, but as yet they have not replied.... It is difficult to know what they could do (except worry); perhaps a more accurate survey would clarify the actual danger area.
Two other rather alarming underground incidents in Ireland are worth telling. The first was on our first Irish expedition, in September 1979. The scene was a wooded valley near Kenmare, in glorious County Kerry, where we had read of streams sinking and rising time after time as they crossed small limestone outcrops. It was a dry and sunny day. Following one stream through the woods, we found it sinking into its bed, with a few metres away an open hole down which running water was audible. Arthur Champion disappeared down it, and was soon back, telling of an easy but wet crawl for 30 metres or so to the top of a short waterfall; it was certainly worth surveying. Collecting a tape, a compass and Richard Gibson, he vanished down the hole again, leaving me pottering on the surface.
On the surface a peaceful half hour passed, than the duo suddenly burst from the hole, in a highly aggrieved state; Arthur helmetless, and clutching a badly-cut hand, and both of them white and shaking. They first accused me of not warning them about the weather; this was puzzling, as it was still dry and sunny. It took some time for us all to realise what had happened.
Underground, they had surveyed into the cave. Nearing Arthur's previous limit of exploration, they were puzzled why they could not hear the waterfall he had reached an hour before. Then suddenly it dawned on them; the water ahead was deeper, and it was silently but swiftly rising. Survey was instantly abandoned, and a quick retreat made through rapidly-reducing airspaces. There was one desperate moment where reduction was to zero, and a three-metre free-dive was necessary. This was where Arthur had lost his helmet, and cut his hand.
We returned to the cave entrance, and watched the water level climbing across the entrance chamber. It kept on rising, until the chamber was full to the roof, and then it overflowed and the entrance, until then a sink, became a resurgence. This was exceedingly strange! But as we watched, a long tongue of water came snaking up the dry stream bed below the entrance, to meet the issuing flow. And it dawned on us what was going on.
Although we had not realised it, we were within a few hundred metres of the sea - and, as tends to happen in such places, the tide had come in. It came in first inside the cave - possibly because the incoming sea-water had pushed a whole cave-full of water back the way it had come - and then on the surface. The entrance was right on the high tide mark; within an hour the water had fallen again, and the entrance became a sink once more. Later we found the resurgence, at the lower tidal limit; the stream trickled out amongst seaweed-covered boulders. Nearby was an open cave entrance, which seemed to sump after 15 metres; we christened it 'Beneath the Salt Cave', but for some reason no-one was very keen to spend much time in it.... The sink cave became 'Deathtrap Hole'. We rapidly turned out attentions to other caves further up the valley, beyond the reach of the tide, where we found several satisfying 'through trips'. One was Waterpump Cave, 180 metres long, with a desperate duck half way along it. We explored the cave from both ends, and realised that there was just enough airspace to shine a light through in a nearly-sumped bedding. Donal Gilhuys of the Irish Speleological Association had joined us for the weekend, so we invited him to have the honour of making the link, and admired his technique of gentle on-the-back progress; the only way to breathe was to 'kiss the stone' (i.e. the roof) - hence the name, 'The Blarney Duck'). It was not a place to make waves.
Further upstream was another through-trip, Confluence Cave, with 150 metres of passages including some sizeable chambers housing large roosts of bats, at first dangling like black furry fruit, then, being roused by alien intruders, taking to the wing in eerie silence.
The third event is not the easiest to retell, as it involves some injury to personal pride, and to my admitting to being an official cave rescue statistic. This was back in Waterford in Ballynamintra Cave, only a few kilometres from Ooanagaloor. As with Ooanagaloor, this cave had come to our attention through archaeological references; it had been excavated in the 1870s and 1880s. The archaeological material - including bones of Giant Irish Deer, Bear and Reindeer - had been in the entrance passage, now cleared out to a 3-metre diameter tube; the digging had opened out a crawl into an inner chamber floored by banks of stalagmite. In October 1988 a small Moldywarp team, aided by John Dowds, turned their attention to this inner chamber. There were two possible routes forward, an earth-choked crawl at the far end of the chamber, and a narrow cross rift in the floor. We tried the crawl first; the earth was soft, and easily diggable. Leigh Blanks and I moled our way forward, to where the floor dropped away again into higher passage. We only gained 10 metres of new cave, but what a 10 metres - the passage was an oval tube 4 metres wide and 1.5 metres high, almost blocked by a forest of pure white stalagmite columns, whilst the roof was festooned with hundreds of straw stalactites. That afternoon John Dowds removed his muddy boiler suit and boots, and crawled in just far enough to provide a human scale on our photographs; to try and push any further would have been sacrilege. The 'White Forest Grotto' is one of the most attractive piece of cave we have ever found.
Back in the main chamber, we then turned our attention to the cross rift in the floor. John went down first, and found a hole over a stalagmited boulder with both a good draught and an echo, hinting at large spaces beyond. He squeezed over the boulder, and I followed, with some difficulty, comforted by the fact that a little hammer and chisel work would ease the squeeze for my exit. Beyond were some small chambers, and a rift, soon closing to even-tighter constrictions. John exited, I tried to follow... To cut a long story short, I failed to get up through the squeeze, and hammering and chiselling didn't help - the boulder was much harder than it looked. The other half of the expedition had to be retrieved from Dungarvan 15 km away (just as they were settling over their first pint of Guinness). They arrived bearing coffee, sandwiches, dry clothes, and further hammers and chisels. Fortunately I was not actually stuck in the squeeze, I just couldn't get through it. I retreated with the coffee, sandwiches and dry clothes to quite a comfortable chamber just below, whilst the physical assault on the boulder continued; two hours later it had been reduced sufficiently for me to struggle out. Then John, very discreetly, pointed out that he was involved in organising the Irish Cave Rescue Organisation, and that for every 'official call out' they logged (and he had been present) they could claim extra government grant, did I mind if....
Thus I became a statistic; I am only thankful it didn't hurt too much.
15. FLOODS, FORDS AND FIESTAS: THE SAGA OF PUNCHARD GILL
In December 1991 Ernie Shields and myself sat in his car and gazed at the ford in front of us; Little Punchard Gill, lying between us and civilsation, was no longer little, but an angry torrent surging down its steep valley in full spate. Behind us lay an abandoned caving trip, as fast-rising water had chased us out of the newly-discovered Fox Level Cave. A warm wind had cleared the first snow cover of the winter within a few hours, and as the landscape changed from whtie to dirty green, the streams had been transformed into writhing serpents of brown water capped by white horses of foam. In the morning Little Punchard - dry in the summer - had been running strongly, but quite fordable. Now it was a different matter. We looked at each other. 'In Africa we had a phrase for times like this' said Ernie (he had driven in Africa, and I think finds English roads boring); he proceeded to quote it, as he drove straight into the maelstrom. It was a remarkable display of self-control and determination. I was most impressed, especially as the stream came over the bonnet..
Sadly, the Ford Fiesta was not designed for subaqueous progress, and only made it half way. Hanging onto each other, we waded to the bank, then dripped and shivered for three miles down to Whaw to find a friendly farmer who came and towed the car from the by-now abating torrent, and assisted in a three-mile bump start before the diesel engine could be coaxed back into life.
Cavers probably become more familiar with water, both above and below the surface, than does the average member of the public. This is hardly surprising, as water is the main agent involved in the formation of caves, a powerful and sometimes unpredictable agent. Familiarity should never be allowed to become contempt, as we found out that day.
The two Punchard Gills are headwaters of the largest tributary of the Swale, the stream variously known as the River Arkle or Arkle Beck, flowing down Arkengarthdale. Reeth, the largest village in Swaledale, is sited on the spur of land in the angle between the two valleys. Arkengarthdale is not long, but has some memorable characteristics. One is the great rampart of Fremington Edge, a limestone scar that marches for three or four miles along the northern horizion, and the other is the general havoc wrought by the old lead miners in the mid-section of the valley around Langthwaite. However, one generation's industrial wasteland becomes a unique historic landscape to the next, and paradise for the industrial archaeologist. This is one of the best places in the North of England to examine hushes, the gullies cut to expose lead veins, using water power provided via an elaborate system of water channels and dams; there are disused levels, shafts and mine buildings in plentiful supply although structures such as the great octagonal smelting mill near Eskeleth Bridge were demolished only a few years before they would surely have been scheduled as ancient monuments.
It is this middle section of the valley that is most deeply scarred by mining; above the hamlet of Whaw, Arkengarthdale divides into a series of tributary valleys where, beyond a scatter of farms around the Tan Hill road, man's influence on the bleak landscape is much less pronounced, with only a scatter of old lead mines, and a few small quarries with ruined lime kilns. One of these headwaters, on the south, is Punchard Gill, which, a kilometre upstream of the road, divides into two separate feeders, Great and Little Punchard. Both of these remote valleys cut the Great Limestone, the principal cave-bearing stratum in the area, and had attracted Moldywarp attention from the earliest years of the Group.
In Little Punchard, the narrower and more deeply-incised of the twin valleys, the limestone was exposed in quite a spectacular gorge, where on some occasions we found part or all of the stream sinking, apparently feeding a powerful spring about 1 km to the north, in the shallower valley of Great Punchard Gill, where the limestone showed through in only a few small scars and old quarries. We sensed the possibility of a reasonable cave system, and mounted a series of assaults in the early months of 1969; the group logbook tells of the discovery of promising holes, and then their loss beneath vast snow drifts. Eventually, scrambling around in the Little Punchard gorge, we found two or three small caves (the largest the 15m deep Silver Birch Pot) but none give any real promise of leading down to the waterway which we realised must lie beneath. Frustration grew, and eventually we turned our interests elsewhere, vowing to return later...
We did return, and it was quite some time later. On the afternoon before the groups 25th Anniversary Dinner, in October 1991, Punchard was chosen as one of the venues of no less than four prospecting trips, so great were the numbers of assembled active or semi-retired Moldywarps. The choice of Punchard was made partly 'for old time's sake'; a lot can change in twenty years, choked shafts fall open, or new sinkholes start operating.. The hope was that at least one of these trips would give us a find we could link to our anniversary.
In those twenty two years there had been quite a number of changes in the Moldywarps. For one of our first annual dinners we had tried to book a meal at the Punchbowl Hotel, Low Row, but had been turned down when they learned who we were - for some strange reason, cavers and potholers did not have a very good reputation when it came to dinners in hotels. But now, under landlord Pete Row, a Moldywarp himself, the Punchbowl had become a centre for caving and outdoor activities in general, and was the obvious venue for our dinner.
However, when we got to Punchard, everything seemed much the same. Punchard Gill was still sinking in its bed in the limestone gorge and the rising in Great Punchard, apparently welling up from tiny submerged fissures, still looked rather daunting. However, a small tube was found in an old quarry on the north bank of the stream nearby, and thought promising enough for a return to be made.
The dinner was a great success; on the following day, on a gentle post-prandial foray, the choked tube in the Great Punchard quarry was probed again. The rock jammed in it proved less portable than we had hoped - but members of the party, notably Robin Sermon and Pete Grant (who had been absent from the winter assaults on the area all those years before) turned their attention to the rising, and by pulling out loose rocks managed to drop the water level half a metre or so, revealing that the water emerged from a stream passage in solid rock, blocked by one large boulder; this looked much more promising.
The next few weeks saw a second speleological assault on Punchard, led by Petes Roe and Grant and the Punchbowl fraternity; old friends like Dave Carlisle were brought into the fray as well. And this time the work paid dividends. The more intrepid members of the team managed to force a way into the rising, via a low duck, into a wet low crawl that opened up into larger passages; all too soon a boulder choke was met, but there was one branch passage that ran back towards the surface, ending in a tiny rift just big enough to thrust an arm through. The surface party spotted a had waving from a rock face, and, after returning the greeting, enthusiastically enlarged the hole so that caver could follow arm, and a new, and far less aqueous entrance was opened up.
This scenario, of a spacious passage a few metres above a smaller wetter one, is quite common; the larger passage is probably the old pre-glacial cave, blocked up at its entrance by glacial boulder clay; since the retreat of the ice the stream had cut down to a lower level, and produced a new passage, which was still 'immature', small and tight. The boulder clay plug removed, an easy way into the old higher-level cave was open.
Meanwhile, a couple of hundred metres up the valley, Dave Carlisle and friends had re-opened an old lead mine, Fox Level; one of Dave's friends had talked to an old miner some years before, and recalled him saying that this level (little more than a trial) had intersected a natural cave. For once an oral tradition proved completely accurate - 45 metres from the entrance, the mined passage cut a natural one; there was one cave passage high up on the right (some old rails provided convenient footholds for the climb) and another at floor level on the left. So we had two 'new' caves systems on our hands, both looking very promising.
The floor-level passage was a low crawl, leading into a wider but only slightly higher passage, with some small stalactites; this ended in a choke, but Pete Roe and Jim Davis dug through this and dropped down into what we called the Water Chamber where the cave really began to look as if would go places; several passages radiated off, one leading to a streamway. You could even stand up in places! The high-level passage on the right of the level wound its way through some fine formations, to end in a short mined-out section and a choke.
It was during the exploration and survey of the Water Chamber area, just before Christmas, that Ernie and I had our experience of flooding above and below ground. Grovelling into the dug-out entrance to Fox Level beneath a cascade of icy meltwater, we did keep a careful eye on the water levels, and as soon as we noticed the stream rising, beat a retreat. Discretion is always the better part of valour in such circumstances; in retrospect, discretion might have been in order an hour or so later on the surface, at the Little Punchard ford..
Ernie, undeterred was back, with Pete Roe, on St Valentine's Day. This time they attacked the boulder choke in the Resurgence Cave, and broke through into a series of passages which Rich Gibson and I surveyed a fortnight later. The first section was distinctly bouldery - in fact there were a series of chambers where very little solid rock was visible, and one felt like the proverbial fly crawling round inside a coal scuttle. Thing got a little better when one emerged into a broad chamber, with a flat roof, beneath which a whole bed of limestone had dropped and broken up, one scrambled across a surface split by deep rifts and crevices, with the stream rushing along below. After another clamber over a big boulder, the cave, which presumably crosses a fault-line at this point, suddenly and abruptly changes in character. The passage becomes much smaller - walking alternating with hand-and-knees crawling - in solid rock, with an arched roof, and occasional displays of spectacular formations. After 90 m or so this attractive going ended suddenly in a deep sump (which Pete Roe has since dived, but not made very much progress); on the right were several side passages, mostly easy but dirty crawls, except for one inlet which horrible liquid mud that got deeper and deeper. Pete pushed this through some horrendous ducks to a sump, and bestowed a series of names on the passage and its various features which, although both imaginative and accurate, are perhaps best left unprinted in an account aimed at genteel readers.
So Great Punchard Gill yielded not one but two caves, each in excess of the magic thousand feet (c330m) in length. We had expected, or at least hoped for, a simple stream system taking the water from Little Punchard down to the Great Punchard resurgence. Experience shows, again and again, that one does not find the sort of cave that one expects to! The real situation was far more complex, and one that we still do not fully understand. There were two caves, and two different streams.. The main stream in the Resurgence Cave is probably the flow from the Little Punchard sink; that in Fox Level probably provides the stream that flows to the horrible muddy inlet in the Resurgence Cave. But where is the Fox Level stream coming from in the first place? Possibly from Great Punchard Gill itself, or perhaps from the hillside to the north. At one point in the complex and low streamways beyond Water Chamber we found chambers with walls and floors of limestone but roofs of boulder clay, probably the boulder clay that lay in the base of the Great Punchard valley. What may have happened here is that the roof of the original cave was broken through, or scraped off, by glacial action; later, when the ice melted, the passage was plugged with boulder clay. Eventually the underground stream re-established itself, re-opening its old passages, but has not yet having removed enough boulder clay to lay them open to the surface again. We found the same phenomenon in a cave in West Allendale (Northumberland) where a chamber we called 'The Claydome' had a hemispherical roof completely of clay; survey showed that at this point the cave was crossing beneath a small surface valley floored by boulder clay.
Discoveries such as the 1991 finds in Punchard Gill will continue to be made throughout the Pennines; virtually every valley that cuts a limestone bed has similar sinkholes and risings. In the early days of the Moldywarps we were still able to come across such places that sported open cave entrances, at least in the more remote valleys. But now cavers have trodden most of the Dales limestones, and unexplored open caves are becoming hard to find; however, there are many places, like Punchard, where a little judicious digging (with, of course, the permission of local landowners and gamekeepers, who can often be persuaded to view well-behaved cavers with amused toleration) will open the door.
POSTSCRIPT
These records chronicle some but not all of the cave discoveries we have made; it would have been possible for fill a volume two or three times as thick as this one if all the memorable days on and under the surface had been chronicled. Shortage of space has meant quite a few other small-scale epics have had to be omitted - the memorable 150 mile round trip by six fully equipped cavers in an Austin A 30, daring deeds in narrow places by the club ferrets, the major discoveries we didn't quite make, and the 25th annual dinner with the entire hotel staff dressed as moles..
The story continues. As this is written a couple of quite major Moldywarp finds still await full examination and survey in a remote corner of Swaledale. Their location and exploration has been an epic in itself, stretching back to the 1960s, which in due course needs to be told...
Copyright Peter Ryder
1. 1The occasional very keen caver may actually use such a device to practise. One Moldywarp ferret used a training routine (in the privacy of his own room) which involved squeezing through a toilet seat (at this stage detached from the toilet; he was yet to attempt the U-bednd squeeze) every day. One day he got stuck, and was forced to seek the help of others for his release. The others (he was living at an Outdoor Activity Centre at the time) have had considerable difficulty erasing the image of him, stumbling round pleading for help, with the seat jammed round his hips, from their minds...
2. In retrospect this may have been a garbled version of the Richmond legend of the Little Drummer Boy, who explored a subterranean cave or vault whilst his companions on the surface followed the subterranean beat, which suddenly stopped. As the Cave Rescue Organisation was still some centuries in the future, that was the end of the story.
3. One has to be very careful putting fluorescein in streams. There is a legend that cavers put so much dye down a sink in Dentdale that it coloured the River Dee a brilliant grass-green, so green in fact that several cows were drowned trying to walk on it.