Tag: Easegill

Jason, Tom, Will

Bright and early I was up at the farm and marching across the moor to Lancaster, pre-rigging it for our through-trip, planned to be an unusual route of Boundary to Lancaster.

Back at the cars and with Jason and Will kitted up, we stomped over the fell to upper Easegill and the second-highest entrance of the system. Jason led the way into the entrance squirm, clearing out the spiders for a clean run through. The promised ’10 minutes of rough caving at the start’ inevitably took about 25 minutes, and Will’s trust in Tom’s time estimates was broken. The route’s largely flat-out, with a bunch of awkward free-climbs and puddles along the way, and we were all hauling bags of SRT gear etc which snagged on everything. 

But before long we’d broken out into the bigger stuff, and made the sketchy traverse round and free-climb down, then Crossover passage into Fusion Cavern. Shortly after this we bumped into a couple of folk on their way out of a Wretched-Boundary trip – those entrance climbs would be a bit interesting to squeeze up. On to one of my favourite bits of Boundary, a crystal false floor at chest height across the passage, which looks just like a miniature map of the Grand Canyon. 

Not long after, we were into Hiroshima Chamber, and tiptoed round the bouldery chaos and up onto the ledge, before popping down the wonderful Manhattan Connection, which spits you out high up on a wedgie traverse high above Far East passage. Getting up into Nagasaki, we were all pretty sweaty and took a R&R break. 

Now it was just a few minutes’ caving to reach the Assembly Hall and we were dangling precariously on the handlines to shuffle round to one of the jewels of the system, the lovely Easter Grotto. The perfect spot for a sit down and enjoying the beauty of this passage for a few minutes.

Back to the Assembly Hall and we headed down the two off-balance handlines and hopped down White Way into the stream. Thackrays Passage is always a nice stomp after everything you’ve been through, and with water levels super low we were almost tempted to try straight through with the stream where the stal grill bypass branches off, but it still wasn’t an appealing-looking place.

By the time we were at Holbeck Junction and making our way towards Stop Pot, we were all feeling well exercised and having recently done the through-trip a few times now, we decided to cut the trip short and just take a different route out of County so Will could see the Eureka and Whiteline route out. All went slickly until we got to the County Pitch, where we were greeted by a ladder and at least 4 ropes down the pitch! The sound of shuffling up above and we realised it was the aftermath of Red Rose’s try caving event. We knitted our way through the chaos to make our way up the in-situ and soon caught the back of the party up, had a good chat with them all at the entrance, and saw plenty of smiling faces of new folk bitten by the bug.

We marched back via Lancaster to de-rig the sadly unused rope, before getting back to the cars and helping one of the novices find his car keys, which he’d descriptively hidden behind ‘some moss’. 

Shame we dragged our SRT kits the whole way through for mostly no reason, but still a good day, I love this end of the system and the endless combination of different routes you can take between any 2 entrances!

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.

Ami, Maz, Steve, Tom

This was meant to be Mistral, it was meant to be muddy. It also meant no takers. So a plan was hatched to pop over to Easegill for something a little more refreshing.

So on a Wednesday night, four of us, Tom, myself, Steve and Ami headed off across the moors for a date with County Pot.

I’ve not done this many times and my navigation isn’t great, so we were relying on Tom for safe passage through the cave.

Based on the notes I received after the event, we did the following: Mushroom Passage, Platypus Junction. At this point Steve and Amy went AWOL, exploring passages and the like.Then on to Spout Hall, Trident Series, White line, before returning back to Oxford Circus.

To be honest, it was all a bit of a blur. nice cave, nice formations, nice company. Admittedly I had no idea where I was most of the time, but that didnt matter.

The most notable thing was me discovering at the bottom of a pitch that my hand jammer had disappeared. A bit of organisation for the others and I was borrowing superior kit to ascend. It was a bit of a mystery as to it’s location and I had resigned myself to buying some new shiny kit.

On the final section getting out, a shout from above revealed Ami had discovered it lying of the floor somewhere quite random, thus entitling her to a free breakfast in our cafe.

A great night out. Thanks to those who led and rigged the pitches

John, Miranda, Tim D, Tom, Will

It was about time that the Manchester Bypass – the flood escape route from Easegill which often gets neglected from regular trips because it’s a shithole – was re-familiarised and the knowledge passed on. 

For whatever reason we decided it was best to do it both ways to double the suffering wholesome knowledge. So across the moor we headed and slipped down the County entrance series like nobody’s business. When we reached the sharp end at Battle of Britain Chamber, Tim led the way on, closely followed by Tom who had insisted he would never fit through after an attempt earlier in his caving career, even more so the day after getting back from an all-inclusive binge of a holiday. But through some optimistic and knowledgeable coaching from Tim, there were no particularly difficulties. Not to say that it wasn’t tight and horrible, but it was good to be able to finally see this route. 

On reaching Main Line Terminus, we sat to collect our thoughts, get a few nice photos and admire the vastness of the high level route from a different angle. Miranda, Tom and Will headed back a little and into the lovely Main Line Passage, a lesser-visited spot as it’s not a through route but with plenty of nice straws and a few helis. This terminates high up in the wall in Monster Cavern, so we turned back and headed to the Terminus. 

There was some talk of avoiding the horrors of the bypass for an easy exit via Wretched Rabbit, but we realised that Miranda had helpfully left some clothing halfway through the bypass, and also the impracticality that we’d left all our SRT kit at the bottom of the County entrance pitch so would have a hard time getting it back from the outside. So we dove back into the bypass for a thrutch-fest in reverse. Some difficulties on the way in became easier in this direction, but new struggles replaced them from nowhere. 

We were all quite knackered on getting out, and John enjoyed getting up close and personal with a welly-thieving bog on the walk back, but we all lived to tell the tale, and pass the knowledge of this grubby route on to future generations to suffer.

Photos by Will and Miranda

Dave, James, Tom

Dry Gill was on the list, but once again the weather decided it wasn’t Jason’s day, so we decided to get to Easter Grotto having failed with high water a couple of weeks ago itself. 

Water levels were nice and low, we got into Boundary no problem, surprised to find the wet entrance bits not too bad at all; I’ve only done Boundary in dry summery conditions. We made our way down the sketchy climbs, Fusion Cavern and past the crystal Grand Canyon map and found ourselves at Hiroshima in no time, and down the Manhattan Connection to Nagasaki. It’s always surprising how thirsty Easegill makes me, but we’d left our water bottles by the entrance of Wretched in an effort to travel light, and were pretty sweaty by this point. 

Thankfully we had Easter Grotto to distract us and take a breather. Dave got a few photos, then we headed on our way downstream and out through the speedy shortcut that is Spiral Staircase. Bursting out of the entrance pipe to our water bottles, we drank deeply and once again I promised myself I’d always take water down with me on Easegill trips.

Photos by Dave

Dave, James, Maz, Tim K, Tom

Really damp week, so we had to be more realistic about reaching our plan of Easter Grotto. The Gill was flowing when we got down to it, and after negotiating the entrance climbs we took one look at the hole down into Spiral Staircase and thought ‘sod that’. Instead we made our way down WR passage, through the flood escape of Fourways and into Stop Pot. The water was churning and we headed a short way upstream before being stopped by the low bit that spits you out at stream level just above a churning deadly chaos of streamway. We turned back at this point and headed back out the same route. At least we got a decent bit of exercise in the assault course that is WR

On a chilly but dry Saturday morning, Yolanda and I set out to tackle the Magic Roundabout series. Despite passing this bit of Lancaster Hole plenty of times, I had never investigated further. To be honest, I had never liked the idea of committing my life to the unknown qualities of the in-situ Arson Shaft rope, but as it turned out my fears were unfounded.  The rope and anchors are excellent!
From the bottom of the Lancaster pitch, we took the direct route through Montague East to Stake Pot. On the other side, I started to ferret around for the window into Arson Shaft, finding the other route towards Link and Cape Kennedy in the process. The initial step above the drop into Arson Shaft actually wasn’t too bad, and the rope hangs against the wall all the way to the top, where there’s a step into a shallow parallel shaft. Two more short pitches upwards brings you into the well-decorated Old Kent Road. At this point we had a break while Yolanda dispensed with some of her Arctic Layering System (well, it was cold outside!)
Old Kent Road is a bit of a crawl, whilst trying your best not to break the floor-level straws. I forgot to find the turn off to The Chocolate Box (one for next time), and we soon ended up at a short rigged pitch down. Across the pit is apparently the route to The Pristine Way, but it looked like a serious undertaking (anyone done it? Are there some spit threads hidden in the wall somewhere perhaps?). Down the pitch, and we joined a stream which led us to the 23m Aquarius Pot. This is easily rigged for pull through with a 50m rope, and has a bit of tat at the bottom ledge to get down the next short drop.
The next section follows a washed out shale bed at floor level, then stay high to access a pre-rigged 9m pitch. A few Swinsto-esque cascades brings you to a chamber at head height. This is apparently the way up to rejoin the base of the Arson Shaft, or alternatively squeeze out next to Bob’s Boss. We opted to stay in the stream, and a couple of minutes later were debouched into the Main Drain just upstream of Stake Pot.
We felt like we’d prusiked enough for one day, so opted to upgrade the trip to Mega status by exiting from Wretched Rabbit. The upstream section from Stake Pot passed too quickly, and soon we were at Oxbow Corner. In the past, I’ve always followed the water at stream level through the boulder choke, but today we spotted a handline on the left, which led us easily up through the boulders. Top shortcut!
A series of large muddy caverns followed. I ruefully spotted the place where Sophie had plied Tom and myself with mulled wine and mince pies last time. But alas, it was Christmas no longer, and the eternal night of the cave cared nothing for my tears. Onwards to Stop Pot, then Four Ways Chamber.
The usual struggle up Wretched Rabbit brought us to daylight. At some point, it had occurred to me with dismay that Lancaster Hole, which still needed derigging, isn’t really on the way back from Wretched Rabbit. Yolanda had left her keys in my van, and my keys were hidden somewhere near the farm, so she bravely kept me company on the beeline slog across the open moor to Lancaster Hole. The day’s struggles were not over as I unknitted our rope from two student club ropes (with the aid of lots of swearing) in the Lancaster shaft.
All in all a very good trip to a different bit of cave. Thanks again to Yolanda!
Scott