Smeltmill Beck Cave, a pretty cool cave
Sunday September 1st 2024
Members present: Alfie Exall, James Goldberg
Report by James Goldberg
The day started with me picking up Alfie from the train station, after that we drove for about 45 minutes to the cave. The cave entrance can be found just below the A66 near Brough. We pulled into a small car park and got changed and then set off to the cave. Unfortunately due to a barbed wire fence, getting to the cave involved walking down a steep field to get into the streamway only to then go back up to the cave entrance which is very close to the car park. The cave entrance is a small hole at the bottom of a cliff, from which the stream comes out of. After entering the cave we were immediately greeted by freezing cold water as we prepared to go through the duck.
The duck was a fairly wide passage that we could stand in, however the water was so deep that it was up to our shoulders and there wasn't a whole lot of airspace. After getting out of the duck we were both freezing and wet however we warmed up pretty quickly. We followed the streamway upstream and passed some really interesting calcite formations and then we got to the Cairn Chamber. As the whole cave is a streamway there are not many large chambers, however the Cairn chamber is probably the largest part of the cave.
After leaving the Cairn Chamber we walked through the hanging gardens, which was a very nicely decorated section of streamway filled with stalactites and other calcite structures. After the hanging gardens, we climbed up to the cascade traverse. Despite being a streamway, the cave is very flat and the highest change in elevation is a slightly uninspiring 3 foot cascade, and to get over the cascade involves climbing the cascade traverse.
Shortly after the cascade traverse, we got to a tight duck called The Grovel. The Grovel leads into a very narrow passage called the red deer rift, the reason that it is called that is because it contains fossilised remains of a red deer. This section of the cave not only was tight, but also had very sharp rocks so we made progress quite slowly. After another 20 or 30 minutes we reached the main junction.
The main junction is almost a mile into the cave and presents two options, to the right is the Keyhole Passage which leads to Choke Aven and to the left is the Handwrecker Passage which leads to the upstream sump. We decided to take the keyhole passage however we didn't end up getting to the Aven, as we decided to turn back because we were slightly worried about the afternoon rain turning the duck into a sump.
It took us a lot less time to leave the cave than it did to enter, and luckily when we got to the entrance duck it had not flooded which was pretty good news. Overall Smeltmill Beck Cave was a really good experience and has some very unique rock formations, 10/10 would recommend.
Macmillan Book Publishers. London. 1978.
