Northern Pennines – Kendal Caving Club

31 May 2026

By Tom C In Day Trips

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.

11 May 2025

By Tom C In Day Trips

Nenthead – Caplecleugh

Ami, Chris G, Scott, Tom

We assembled at Nenthead after the usual long drive and met up with Chris, a friend of Maz’s doing his second club trip, but being an already seasoned Northern Pennines mine explorer he’d been keen to get into Nenthead.

After reading that Caplecleugh had run in earlier in the year, my hopes of someday doing the Greater Nenthead Traverse had been dashed, and instead we’d planned to do Smallcleugh to Nentsberry Haggs, which was most of the traverse minus the first few hours.

But chatting to some Nent experts who were also getting changed, we learnt that the first section m

ight actually have been reopened. We hastily rescheduled, especially at the thought of ditching the long rope, and made the 30 metre commute to the adit. It was easy going in sturdy open passage for a while, until the roof began to look increasingly sketchy as we hit the shale drives. As the roof lowered and the route started disappearing under damp low arches, we began to pray softly to the shale gods to wait just an hour longer as we wriggled delicately beneath hanging slabs a metre wide.

After around half an hour of dodging hanging death, things became more stable again and we were stomping up lovely arched passage. We came upon a fresh collapse, and while there was plenty of space to clamber over it, it’d blocked the stream which had pooled behind it to within an inch of the ceiling. After a bit of debate, somebody* decided to pull the plug on the blockage. A dribble of water began flowing over the top. Then a stream. And as the stream increased, it washed more and more of the blockage out, until we had to make a retreat from the torrent we’d created. Moving back into more open passage, and locating a rise upwards that we’d be able to scrat up if needed, we perched on a little mud bank out of the water and waited for things to drain.

After 10 minutes or so the flow was noticeably lower and we headed back up to see…open passage! Still chest deep or so, but we were through and up to the toilet box junction in a few minutes. There was some confusion about the route on from here, having being given the directions of left then right. We headed along a long damp route to the left at the toilet box, passing under numerous falls, chutes and ladders until eventually things got cold and deep. We hit a right hand junction but eventually decided to get out of the water, and headed up a ladder equipped with a modern rope.

This took us up about 25m into some fantastic flats, full of rails, artifacts, gunpowder, and some sketchy in-situ stuff. A pitch headed off up a shaft but we weren’t fancying it without further research. We headed back down to the horse level and had more of a poke around various side passages. Happy that we’d had a good explore, knew a lot more about this end of the traverse and now keen to get the return through the shaley stuff behind us, we headed back out. With a minor roof collapse onto Scott’s back, we made it back out unscathed for yet another session of ‘why did we waste another day of scorching weather on this hobby?’.

18 September 2024

By Tom C In Day Trips

Smeltmill Beck Cave

Jasmine, Maz, Scott, Tom

This had been on the meets list but rained off so many times, but this time we weren’t going to let it go. After calling the farmer for permission, we met up at Light Trees below the A66 for a slippery scramble up the beck. Maz had been before and expertly found the entrance, a grim little arch with a chilly stream emerging.

Thankfully, we were all wetsuit/drysuited up and the entrance wallows, while not pleasant, didn’t particularly disturb us. The deep water and low roof soon ended, and lifted into a lovely mile-long walking-height streamway.

Even though we had a survey and the cave is essentially just one long passage, it was difficult to figure out where we were up to, with endless sharp switchbacks and grabby passage walls. We were all surprised by how decent the formations were throughout, especially the Hanging Gardens. Each new section of passage brought a different character – nothing particularly difficult but all quite interesting, and something different from the usual Dales caves.

A low wallow at stream level took us into Red Deer Rift, the narrowest and grabbiest bit of the trip. But all too soon this was behind us and the passages were wider but lower, with a more sinister nature. At Main Junction we headed left towards the Handwrecker Series, and after posting ourselves into a watery slot we started to feel rapidly ready for hometime and called it a day.

Most trip reports mentioned it feeling quicker on the way out, but we didn’t feel that way – a mile is a long way to go in these snarly little passages, but it’s a good feeling of progress passing through the different sections. All in all, 7.5/10, would revisit as far as Red Deer Rift 🙂

Tag: Northern Pennines