Ireby Fell Cavern to Duke Street 2 via Ding/Dong/Bell and Shadow

Friday July 11th 2025

Members present: Erika Lang,  James Goldberg,  Viki Smyth,  Will Barlow

In planning this trip, I looked at the topo, saw both routes, and thought "wouldn't it be fun to rig both". It turns out that it is actually really cool rigging both. The top of Shadow and Dong are located in the same chamber, so you can almost talk to each other whilst rigging/derigging. On the way back I found myself derigging Shadow whilst sat on this small shelf a few metres above the traverse line of Dong pitch. Right below me was Viki derigging Dong, a few metres to my left was James prusiking up Ding, and above me atop of Ding was Erika. Rather than the typical feeling of being separated whilst doing pitches, this felt much more like a fun group activity.

The rest of the trip was very cool. Of note was that Well was already rigged, however the in-situ rigging skipped the first bolt of the traverse line to the second hang of the pitch, therefore creating an umbrella, which is just fun. The first section of Duke Street is really interesting, as there is almost no echo (possibly due to the large amount of sand but I don't really know). I felt like I wasn't even in a cave. The rest of Duke Street is pretty awesome. Some way into Duke Street we found the rope hanging down which led up to the sump bypass crawl. A long sandy crawl, the first half mostly hands and knees, the second involving quite a bit of flat out, leads to a fantastically echoey streamway. From there it is only a short distance of knee to waist deep water to Duke Street 2, which is similar to Duke Street but bigger and better. On the way back James and I went through the crawl first, only to arrive at the end and listen to the faint thundering of Viki and Erika increasing in volume and turn into Erika's wriggly worm song.

Overall a very cool trip.