Lancaster Hole

Ami, James, Steve – Report by Steve

Armed with a plan and an A4 extract off the survey we headed to the entrance with the aim to simply find our way around some key points. Between us we’d either never been in before or usually followed others around without a care in the world. So whilst we did miss the usual faces for the KCC Wednesday night trips it was a good opportunity for us to go it alone and get our bearings.

We soon discovered we had to share Ease Gill with another group as we found it rigged. However, Ami soon had our rope rigged and we were on our way down in a bit of a shower. It was nice to dump the SRT gear and move around a bit easier.

Slow and steady found us up the climb to the Colonnades. It looks like theres a clean up project ongoing with small mud walls, 1” to 2” high separating the walkway from the some of the calcite floor. The CNCC notes suggest the colonnades formation was expedited by the lime kilns on the surface above, this planted the idea of a spin off surface trip to find them one sunny afternoon. Continuing past, we thought we’d reached the end of that section when we read the ‘bad air’ comment on the survey, given we are all still here maybe there was more to go at.

Back at Bridge Hall we descended into Kaths Way and made our way under the large boulder and onto the muddy slopes around the Fall Pot Area. We had a good look at the fixed lines and other anchors for the Fall Pot routes.

Back over the muddy slopes and across the rift to a 3 rung aluminium ladder up towards Montagu West and its dry mud crawls to the T junction. The streamway could be heard at this point via a hole in the floor. By now we were at the end of the survey sheet and into the hand amended bits pointing towards cross passage and Wilf Taylors Passage. We felt like we’d met our route finding objectives so began to make our way back to the entrance pitch.

We took a more direct return route back and within 30 minutes we were kitted up and on our way up the pitch. The other group had left so only our rope remained which was handy to avoid the cats cradle in the entrance pipe. With James de-rigging we were out in the rain about 1 hour after turning round.

This was very much a route finding trip, identifying future routes and trips of which theres obviously plenty ! All in all a pleasant 3 hours plodding around underground.