Henning Valley Cave + WHL
Dave, Tom, Scott, Pete, Nat, James, Steve and guest attendee Simon.
Gathered on a quiet street leading out of Lindal-in-Furness rather than the Yorkshire Dales, we waited for the last car full of people to arrive. Questioned by the farmer about our intentions, and reminding them of their permission being given previously, we started cooling down. The last 3 arrived and our happy troop of 8 headed off on the short walk in to one of the longest accessible caves in the Peninsula.
We quickly made the entrance and everyone watered the woods before walking into the entrance chamber, which smelled like a public badger toilet, lovely. We filed down the small hole in the floor into the bedding chamber and along the stream passage, which lead to a series of crawls interspersed with smaller chambers for a bit of respite.
We had a rest in heartbeat rift before going through the last really tight crawl to the mosaic floor and the sketchy pitch down to the Crimson Crawl, which seems to be unaffected by the general water table level in the area, James flew off in search of riches unknown, shortly followed by Dave and Steve. This crawl, winding its way along a low, waterlogged stream passage, dotted with polished hematite leads to a natural rift, and intersected by a shirt section of mine level above a tight climb, which naturally we explored and admired the victorian era handy work. Satisfied we filed out and made good time, catching up with the tail end of the rest of the group.
As the night was but young, and all the crawling so far hadn’t made us wet, muddy and tired enough, we nipped across the valley to Whitriggs Horse Level, to show off the museum of artefacts and the dig into the further workings. This was enough to finish us off and we emerged back into the frosty moonlit night at 9:30, a quick March back to the cars and a chilly change finishing off a good night of underground exploring new stuff for most of the party.
