Devis Hole Mine

Maz, Scott, Tom

There was no chance we were going anywhere near the planned Swinsto following some of the heaviest rain since Roman times the day before and overnight, and Maz suggested an adventure over in Swaledale that would make a change to our usual areas of operation.

We descended on Kirkby Stephen for midday and slung our gear into Maz’s van. The hour-long windy road over into, and along, Swaledale was the perfect storm for my travel sickness and I spent the hour with my head out the window counting down the endless little villages before I’d be able to get out. 

Temperatures were ‘brisk to disconcerting’ when we arrived at the parking spot and we wrapped up in more layers than usual, but at least it was dry and sunny. The walk up past Grinton smelt mill was lovely and we were soon up at the sloping pipe entrance. We slithered down easily and into the main level, through a couple of crawly bits and an unavoidable shower before breaking into taller walking passage. Maz’s arse disappeared off into a couple of side passages looking for the maze cave but it was a little further on, where a tall rift had several crawls leading off at head height.

The survey we had hurt the eyes to look at, and we decided to head into the maze for what seemed to be a straightforward little round trip to get a feel for it, only to find things didn’t link back round at the end and backtracked. We took a different passage and began a bewildering journey of trying to remember each turn. With junctions every couple of metres, each passage offered a different shape and challenge. Scott had taken charge of remembering the turns we were taking so we all promptly spread out taking totally different parallel routes just to confuse matters. 

A band of crazy fossilised coral followed us at roof height through most of the passages, with lots to look at when you zoomed into it. Eventually, Scott rang the alarm bell that his working memory of junctions we’d taken had reached capacity, and we began back-tracking. It’s quite disorientating how lost you can feel after covering only about 40-50 metres in there.

We headed back out of the maze to go explore a bit more of the mine levels. First we headed up the West Vein trying to find the Occidental Series. This level is an unusual place, with what looks like natural passage on one wall and mined wall on the other side – probably natural stuff that had been widened. We couldn’t find the way in to Occidental at all, only a collapsed section where we thought it was supposed to be. 

Next we headed along Robinson’s Level. This was easy going, with an impressive dig up and over a large collapse as the only obstacle to walking, and on the far side of the drippy tube of the dig we came across Pearson’s Sump, a 15m shaft that we later learned is the route on to the farther reaches. We sadly hadn’t brought any SRT gear and vowed to return to descend it in the future. 

Time was ticking on now after about 3.5 hours underground, and we knew that snow was forecast and we had a high road to get back over, so we made our way out with a quick stop to have a look along Pearson’s Level before the chore of the entrance pipe popped us back out into darkness, and light snowfall. 

We made it back over the tops to Kirkby just in time, with the snow getting heavier as we passed over.