Two men were recently to be seen peering hopefully down a well near the side of a large field in the Yorkshire Moors National Park, while a group of other men – some clad in full caving gear, some not – progressed erratically first towards the two and then away from them to disappear over a fence and into the dry river bed beyond. The wandering group of men circled as they went, like a swarm of bees, around one who swung an orange instrument from side to side over the ground, producing intermittent streams of beeps that ran up and down the musical scale, to the consternation of an attendant dog. In the intervening silences the group became more like ants, frantically scattering and searching, while the man with the orange instrument galloped about in evident agitation. And all the time, the men at the well maintained their patient watchfulness.
The GOC caving group had tagged along to witness the exploration of a flooded cave by a diver which, it was hoped, would lead from the bed of a river to a nearby well and beyond. The diver had a little black box tucked into his suit and the orange box allowed the band of men in the field to trace his movements by very long wave radio location. His meanderings in chambers in the cave explained theirs – assuming the orange box was not making everything up as it went along. Unfortunately, the diver encountered blocking boulders and could not find his way to the well.
So after commiserating with the disappointed we helped them to carry diving gear back to their cars and went off to Excalibur Cave. Matt had already taken one other GOC member for an aqueous trip into Bogg Hall Rising earlier in the day and we had dallied with the divers for some hours, and so this was only a short end-of-the-day trip. He took us to some less well-known bits of Excalibur Cave where we did a fair amount of crawling about in mud but saw some fine formations as well.
The following morning we drove to Kingsdale in the Yorkshire Dales to visit Growling Hole cave. According to the books, the entrance through a tight, triangular hole leads down to a daunting, low crawl in water in a narrow passage. The books are right on all counts. The triangular hole is negotiable to a modestly-dimensioned man only if he can take on an appropriately triangular cross-section. The crawl is too low for you to get properly onto hands and knees. You lie more or less stretched out for parts of the crawl, and pull yourself along with your elbows. Each person was variously pushing and dragging a tackle bag on a length of rope, depending on how sharp the bends in the passage were and how many protrusions there were to get the bag past. If Martin was not the most daunted of the party, he should have been. When we were putting on our gear he discovered he had left an essential item of SRT kit in the car and so while the rest of us made a start on the cave he went back to fetch it. When he followed us in he crawled through the gloomy passage alone.
Beyond the crawl came tortuous passages where you could stand up some of the time, with one descent on a rope and another one down a shaft too narrow for a rope to be practical. Below that was a sideways squeeze, followed by more. The last one was downwards rather than horizontal. Three members of the party gave it a go and thought it was too tight to be fun any more. So we decided upon retreat. Re-climbing the narrow shaft was not entirely trivial and it warmed us up for the cold, wet wallow back along the entrance passage. The final challenge was to become triangular and yet to wield an arm or leg for propulsion to exit from the cave. I was first out and was entertained to watch each of the others, head and neck out of the ground but apparently unable to move up or down until thoughts of beer and food overcame their enervation.
...Though this might read as a bit of an epic, it is just the way these tales go. We all had a great time!
