Everytime I go to Bagshawe Cavern, we walk past the 20ft hole called “The Dungeon” and wonder what’s down there.
In the summer, Judith, Kev, Matthew Ashleigh and me stomped down the old show cave to the pitch. I rigged a ladder off the ladder rigging and made a lifeline work off the stretcher-rescue bolts.
The problem with Bagshawe lower series is that although a great survey exists, I wasn’t able to find any meaningful descriptions. We were exploring blind – no idea what to expect with just the survey and our intuition to guide us.
After a joyful sandy crawl to bird cavern, popping my head up the Agony Crawl freeclimb, we arrived at a large cavern with a rotting ladder and opportunity to climb up to the right or stay down. This was the junction between the lake and straw passage.
Straw passage – a beautifully decorated through route bedding plane. The lake, a beautifully wet, wild wading opportunity. Beyond this point, the main passage was increasingly well decorated being much prettier than we’d all expected.
Eventually a small climb to the right to a lovely looking phreatic tube with calcites flooring marks the next split in the passage, whilst a lower left hand route looks like a painful crawl over rubble. We took the nice route, eventually arriving at Agony Column – which is not a column.
Agony Column is a wide chamber with lots of dark rock rubble on the floor. Here we had to make decisions, and I decided we should go and look at “Claustrophobia” an extension on the left hand passage.
We crawled over the rubble to be treated with a smooth sandy crawl turning into a stooping passage. Turning right at the junction, we arrived at an unexpectedly large chamber with a hole in the floor…
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Originally posted on this post on Instagram
