Present: Andy, Dave, Bec, Julia, Phil, Ben, Al
Well, here we are, a month later, and the cave (mine?) was so wonderful that I can barely remember anything about it. However, this is what I do recall:
The trip started well, with the standard late start. On travelling through some random village, I spotted a turning which corresponded exactly with the map, and rejected it because it was a bumpy farm track. Two miles further on up past the village, we turned round and went back to my error of judgement. Many slow minutes up the farm track we reached a large puddle, which the drivers refused to cross. Undeterred, I got out of the car, whilst everyone sat and looked miserable, and I squelched past the puddle. Ten minutes up the road, I found the cave (a concrete lump in a field) so I turned round and walked back again. Eventually, everybody got changed, once I had told them we were on the right road, and we stomped up to the cave.
An interesting Y-hang was rigged, well below the top of the cave (or shaft) and people proceeded down. By the time I got down, it was sleeting on me, after failing to even rain on the others. The pitch was a nice straight drop for abseiling down, so I abseiled down it. Even so, a few feet from the bottom, everyone kept telling me to turn my light off, so I turned my light off. (Apparently it looked nice, with a caver hanging off a rope in a shaft of light.) (“My Lord, you are like a stream of bat’s piss!” “Pardon?” “I meant only that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is darkness.”)
Anyway, to get to the point, I was rather surprised when I hit the floor and narrowly avoided injury.
Right. The cave. There were three ways on. We did them all. There were apparently a few pretties but I can’t remember them. We wrote our names on our helmets in mud, but I can’t remember why… On the way out, I was last again, which meant I could watch Phil hanging on the rope with his light off (nice.) After stomping down to the car, we discovered Sigrid was not back, because we’d been quicker than we’d thought. We rapidly got bored, started on burning things and trying to coat our faces in black clag off carbide lights. My suggestion of exploding one of the cars to attract Sigrid’s attention did not go down well, but that was alright, because she turned up clutching a £50 lump of granite (which some random bloke had given to her) and the car key, meaning we could get changed. At this point, the pyromaniacal tendencies of the group ended, we got changed, and we went back to the TSG hut.
Huzzah!
Ben Watkins