Smeltmill Beck Cave

Ami, James, Sophie (OG), Tom

Q: Should we visit Smeltmill Beck during the Appleby Horse Fair?

We met at J36 at 9am hoping to beat the cultural traffic around Kirkby Stephen, and our plan worked! We sailed straight through the police blockades and were changing and at the entrance in no time.

It was Ami, James and Sophie’s first time here and I’d primed them with miserable-looking videos of Maz in neck deep water in the hopes they’d be pleasantly surprised by the place, and it might have worked. Although probably not initially, as I heard various muffled curses mixed with the word ‘TOM’ from behind as I tried to navigate through the horrible wallowy entrance series. Things only progressed from bollock deep, to ovary deep, to boob deep (‘see, it is a varied trip! Varied depths of icy water’) and we all squeeked our various sounds of discomfort, until the roof eventually rose to the second part of the journey which is more canyon-like.

This section’s quite well decorated, if a little sinister, especially around the Hanging Gardens. We were soon at the Grovel which is a nasty little low crawl in water that I’d conveniently forgotten about. The reward for wallowing through this is getting to the suit-destroying section, which has been specially designed to shred your suit at 4 different heights. This gets a bit traverse-y and we took routes at various heights to see which was the best, not that James or I could see Ami and Sophie who were steaming ahead of us.

We caught up to them (actually, they took pity and waited for us) at the big junction, where the choice was offered of left (horrible) or right (horrible). We took the left (horrible) into the Handwrecker series, which we’d been a short way into on a previous visit, and an acrobatic little slot into cold water took us beyond our previous limit. Beyond this was just various branches of pointless crawling, which were only alleviated by some brilliant fossils in the rock.

Ami and James tagged the ends of the two furthest branches we could find, James negotiating a chilly duck for his, and we retreated to the junction where Sophie had thoughtfully dumped a bag of Jelly Babies. We’d been worried about not being able to finish these and whether they’d survive the journey out, but needn’t have since we demolished them in about 30 seconds. Even though other branches of the cave hadn’t yet been dispatched, the pub was calling at this point, and we made a beeline (a very drunk bee if you see the zig-zaggy survey) for the exit, and out to dark clouds.

A lovely pint and truffle chips in the Cross Keys in Tebay cemented its place as a certified KCC post-trip pub option for future visits to the Far North.