Present: Al, Gwyn, Jenny
On my last day of mapping on Skye I awoke to see (through mist and rain) a strangely familiar white van parked outside. It was Gwyn and Al. They didn’t seem very awake at 9am, so I went mapping till lunchtime. After much faffing (and looking for the stuff that Al and Gwyn had so kindly hidden in the caravan) we decided to go caving. Much faffing later we chose a cave (well 3 caves in fact). Even more faffing later we were parked on the roadside near Breakish Bridge ready to go caving.
Breakish Bridge
We found the cave (quite an achievement!) and went caving. The entrance was a tightish crawl that came in near the top of a bigger passage. To get into the bigger passage you had to do a kind of handstand, we were all very clever and managed this with out landing on our heads. We explored all of the passages (most of which didn’t go far). There were some dead big spiders, one of them had a sack of eggs/baby spiders – like in the film ‘Arachniphobia’ but not so scary! Then we came out and walked down the midgie infested river under the road bridge (no trolls insitu) to cave 2:
Breakish Cave
This was shorter than the first cave, but had a nicer entrance and no spiders (that I saw anyway!). We looked at lots of passages and saw some cool formations and Gwyn learnt a lot about Geology. I managed to recognise three rock types – limestone, doleritic dyke and notlimestoneordolerite (apparently this is called sandstone) so six weeks of mapping has paid off…..
Al and Gwyn convinced me to go down a small tight passage with the promise of another entrance and making it a through trip. I crawled and then wriggled for a while thinking they were following me. Then I realised that it was just Al’s amazingly bright carbide light. The passage then got a bit wet and small and I realised they hadn’t followed me for a reason and wriggled backwards far a while till I could turn around.
High Pasture Cave
We drove back towards the caravan stopping to go in the second longest cave on Skye (over 300m long!) on the way. I think this cave is dead good, and I went down it three time in total whilst I was in Skye! There are some really cool formations – the usual stalagmites, stalactites and straws as well as gour pools and other things too. The cave is a bit wet in places, particularly the duck, but it was still passable even though it had rained a lot and we were all very brave. The best formations were in a calcite blocked passage to the left after the duck. Lots more cave with a climb, lots of dykes and more formations led to the boulder choke at the end of the cave.
The duck was still passable on the way out, so we all got out okay AND it had finally stopped raining, so we could get changed in the dry (well I couldn’t ‘cos my dry clothes were in the caravan)
Jenny Black