One Saturday in summer, Siobhan, Monika and Jasmin met me and Judith to get to grips with SRT and roped caving.
When you’re underground, ropes are like roads and can help you access bits of the cave you’d never be able to climb down to. Learning to use SRT (Single Rope Technique) to go down and up a rope opens up a whole new world of easy and harder caving.
To start with, we headed to a popular training venue in Winnats pass to get started with the basics. We went up. We went down. We went along. We did it all again.
By lunchtime everyone was dying for some food, and apparently, a piss. Unfortunately, with tourists hoarding Winnats pass like there was buried treasure, those wishfully thinking of waterfalls were unrewarded until we got back to the cars where Siobhan cheerily announced “cup of coffee anyone?”, resulting in replies of wroth and creative swearwords.
After lunch, we headed for Nickergrove mine, where Siobhan, Jas, Judith and Monika spent 45 minutes have a splendid, scenic, vertical hillside walk before finally locating the entrance, and me. An argument ensued about who was precisely to blame for this, until it was settled by agreeing the walk had been quite nice and no-one had actually minded.
We descended the adit entrance shaft to the window, and then the short shaft to the lower level and crawled on ahead.
—
“Tim, is it this way?”
“Yes, of course” It’s this way, I replied. It was a mined passage, and there was only one way.
“It’s tight and nasty and I don’t know if I can do it” replied Judith
“Give it a go!”
“I’m coming back – you have a go?”
I crawled up to the squeeze that had upset my dearest mother hen, and played sardines to try and make that word.
“Oh, actually the way on is up here” I said, standing up through a wide, spacious hole in the roof no-one had noticed and climbing through.
From below, a sweet song of abuse filtered up from the sardines below.
—
Eventually, we turned around and headed back. Down the hole. Up the mini shaft. Up the mega shaft. Down the adit (not first left!). Out the entrance. Back to the cars. Home to sleep!
A full day with The Caving Crew – anyone keen for another trip to Nickergrove sometime?
Originally posted on this post on Instagram
