Five members of the caving group spent 15th-17th April in North Wales. We stayed on a campsite within a mile of the centre of Llangollen and went walking on the Saturday and caving on the Sunday.
We had no formal plan for the Saturday walk and trustingly followed Matt and Gary as they devised a route up and down the surrounding hills and found their way around it by map without even momentary recourse to satellite navigation. The weather was ideal for walking and bits got added onto the route as the day progressed, so that by the time we arrived back at the campsite we had covered about fifteen miles. Quickly revived by hot showers, bottles of beer, and pieces of shortbread we regained the strength to walk along the towpath into Llangollen for an Indian meal.
A visit to Ogof Llyn Parc had been planned for Sunday but in the event the winch for the entrance pitch was not available. The alternative way up and down the one hundred metre shaft is on a rope. All of us had the experience to take that on, but with each person needing twenty-to-thirty minutes to climb the rope and with six members in the party it would have been a lengthy process. So we opted in favour of the alternative that had been offered to us of visiting Ogof Dydd Byraf (ODB). ODB involves a couple of slightly awkward ladder climbs but no long pitches. It contains some beautifully-decorated chambers and some entertaining crawls that verge on grovels but do not last for too long.
A digging project has been in progress for some time with the hope of finding a connection to an adjacent cave system. In past centuries, some cave passages became filled with sand and clay, and digging out the fill has led to many major finds around the country. The main dig in ODB is now long enough for artificial ventillation to be needed. Without it, exhaled carbon dioxide builds up and people working at the face run into breathing difficulties. The ventillation system in this case is a car heater fan powered by a car battery and connected to a long, lightweight, flexible pipe. Our two devoted diggers, Matt and Gary, did their bit by digging out ten big buckets of sand which the rest of us hauled up the slope to a spoil heap in the cavern from which the passage descends.
After we came out of the cave our guide, Mike, showed us an astonishingly large, oval lime kiln which had made continous processing possible – one of only two that still survive almost intact. All that remained thereafter were our drives home through beautiful countryside on a perfect spring evening.
