Hay Time – 25th January 2017

Dave G, Jason

Before we went, I couldn’t find much information about Haytime online, and Northern Caves doesn’t give a lot away about where to find it. It turned out not to be too hard, even in the dark, but for future reference, you walk up the Pennine Way from the Crown in Horton for about 1km, where you come to a gate.  Carry on for another 100m, then go up an obvious dried-up streambed on your right.  After  maybe 150m, there’s a big shakehole with the entrance to the left.

The entrance crawl is very short, so short in fact that I ignored the unpromising hole in the floor of the first little chamber and continued crawling through an uncomfortable squeeze on the left.  This progresses to a squalid low passage before getting ridiculously tight.  Dave sensibly suggested seeing if the hole was the way on – it was, and I spent the next ten minutes inching out of the squeeze backwards, by now well covered in crap.

The hole on the right turned out to be generously P-hangered (a bit of a clue) but you really don’t need any aids, it’s a simple free climb.  Honestly – it’s a snug rift with plenty of holds, though warm work on the return.  This pitch and the following climbs do have some loose rocks, but we took it carefully and didn’t have any problems.  The last climb is probably the hardest, but there is a decent resident  handline, so there’s no real need to take any tackle.

From the survey, it appears that there’s a direct, wet route, and a longer drier route, both meeting shortly before Helm’s Deep, the final chamber.  The plan was to go down dry and come back up wet.  The actual layout is more complex than the survey suggests, but anyway we went on a long meandering rift – well decorated in parts – to reach a T-junction that was apparently not on the survey.  We turned left, expecting it to quickly choke, but it went on and on, feeling as though we were heading back to where we’d already been.  But abruptly, we found ourselves in the impressive chamber that was undoubtedly Helm’s Deep, whence a short crawl leads to the attractive sump.

Returning, we started up what ought to have been the short, wet route but seemed to be a different dry meandering rift leading to where the other had started.  Whatever.  It was a good fun romp (apart from the unnecessary squalid interlude at the start) in under two hours, and I’d happily return to try and figure out how the passage related to the survey and explore various side passages we left for another time.  My thanks to Dave for turning out and not moaning at my slow pace, I hope we’ll be seeing more of him!

On a less happy note, we were dismayed to find the Crown shut – I hope this isn’t permanent!