Titan Shaft - JH Over-Engine Mine

Sunday April 19th 2026

Members present: Abbie Heathcote,  Elliot Rushton,  Erika Lang,  Sophie Brazil,  Tyler Hudson

I was initially a little sceptical of doing another Titan-JH exchange on the Sunday of the TSG, given that the one last year was my biggest epic to date. But all our little freshlings were so excited to go and it started to look like it could actually work, especially after Rosie told us she was bringing Chris and his car, instead of the Panda, so I got excited too. After all, how could it be longer than last year? We’d waited at the wrong junction for an hour, and also did Ride of the Valkeries (which was very cool but significantly lengthened the trip).

Some shuttling from James and Will got us to the Titan layby and we got changed very efficiently (I didn’t forget my SRT kit and wellies this time!), then we loaded all our stuff back into Will’s car and waved goodbye to him. We decided to take my phone with us, wrapped in 4 different layers of plastic (and a buff), and would call him when we reached the surface so he could come pick us up.

Off we went, trundling up the hill and enjoying the beautiful sunny day for the brief amount of time we were on the surface. As we walked, the reality of my decision to saying yes to rigging Titan really began to sink in. Abbie found the lid, and I opened the padlock with little difficulty (sorry Will, I just have dainty woman hands I guess). I hadn’t packed any of the ropes and I didn’t know which bag was which, so I asked Sophie which was the first one and they replied with no uncertainty nor hesitation, “It’s the red one.”

I rigged a gorgeous y-hang from the bolts, so beautiful I even took a picture of it before beginning my descent. At the bottom of the first pitch I found the smashed padlock Will had been telling us about, and took a picture while I waited for Sophie to join me. I briefly glanced in the tacklesack and thought that there looked to be a lot of excess rope in the bag, but had no further thoughts on this as Sophie had arrived. They handed me the blue tacklesack, and I headed off to the window to rig the next pitch.

Upon rounding the corner my gaze fell upon ‘the window’ and I immediately felt nauseous. Not to worry, I thought, there's still a traverse line to rig before you get over there. I rigged the traverse line far too efficiently and had to make my way over to the horrifying black hole pretty much immediately. I dragged the tacklesack through the water to soak the rope so that it wouldn’t heat up as much when we all descended down. I got to the window, knelt on the ledge and turned up my Fenix beam to look out at the massive cavern. Holy shit.

I began praying to the cave, asking it to have pity on the weak and feeble creature that I am, and to please not kill me or anyone else that day. I rigged the next bolt and then Sophie was there again.

“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“…I’m rather horrified that I’ve agreed to do this.”
“It’s ok, you got this.”

I rigged the Y-hang, with lots of nervous giggles and screeches as I leant out over the 140m drop to clip the crab into the chain, accompanied by more squealing while I had to adjust the knot, still leaning out over the abyss. A bit of stalling ensued while I took some pictures and Sophie took a couple of me, and then I swung out onto the pitch and went down.

I waited on the Event Horizon and Sophie caught up to me once again, handing over the last bag. I made my way over the edge, keeping my feet out as much as possible to avoid the scary rope-rub, and rigged my third and final y-hang.

About 3 metres into my descent, Sophie called down to me.

“CHECK. THE. ROPE. FOR. A. KNOT.”

“O. K.”

I kept going, looking at the bag periodically as I went down. Once I could see there was not loads of rope left, I locked off and checked, then double checked that there was a knot at the bottom. There was, so I continued on. Less than a minute later I looked down again, and saw about 2 metres of rope left below me, then had a mini heart attack when I looked below that to see the bottom of Titan at least another 15 metres below. What the heck?

I quickly locked off my descender and stared rather dumbfounded at the empty tacklesack. I thought we’d overestimated the rope lengths?

Hang on a second.

I pulled up the bottom of the rope and checked the length. 52m.

…

Ohhhhhhhhhh.

I see what’s happened here.

At this point I started laughing and basically didn’t stop for the next 2 hours. But now I can say I did a mid-rope changeover in Titan! Isn’t that fun.

I prussicked back up to Sophie and Tyler, their constant giggling also getting louder.

*I’ll give you something to fricking laugh about, just you wait.*

I reached the Event Horizon and called up to them.

“Heyyy!”

“Heyyy?!?!”

“I. HAVE. THE. WRONG. ROPE.”

“WHAT?!”

“I. HAVE. THE. FIFTY. TWO!!!”

*A beat of silence, then laughter.*

“I’M SO SORRY!”

I derigged and by the time I’d made it back up to them, Sophie had figured out a pretty solid plan. They would take the 52m rope while Tyler and I waited there. Sophie would run up the entrance pitch, derig, drop the rope down to Abbie, Abbie would then pack it and run it down to me, while Sophie re-rigged the entrance pitch and then followed after Elliot.

Tyler and I boot-danced (very carefully) on the Event Horizon while we waited 45 minutes for Abbie to descend down to us with the correct rope. She appeared like an angel from heaven and we cheered as she landed on the ledge with us.

Two hours after my first descent down the last pitch, I had rerigged the Event Horizon, going back over the ledge for the third time, descended all the way to the bottom with enough rope this time, and had sung First Original Thought (by Alessi Rose) about eight times.

Sophie reached the bottom just as Chris emerged from the boulder choke, and the hysterical giggling restarted as we explained to Chris and Rosie what had happened.

So the lesson here is that when you are rigging, you should always double check that the rope in your bag is the right one, and don’t just blindly trust your best friend who would never knowingly lie to you, but absolutely will accidentally.

We found the rest of the way pretty smoothly save for a near death experience on the ladders. The night before we could not for the life of us find a description for the Titan-JH connection, so Sophie found one on UK caving by ‘Sea Moose’, which was confirmed by long-time member ‘Katie’. The description said to go up the ladders and then turn left, NOT over the scary holes with dodgy lines, but up ‘stemple highway’. Well. I reached the top of some ladders, and found ahead of me a pretty big hole with some very sketchy ropes and maillons, and behind me were five rotting wooden beams wedged between sheer mud covered walls, directly over the 10m drop I had just climbed up. The holes matched the description as scary looking, but the wooden beams, or maybe ‘stemples’ looked even more terrifying and I had absolutely no desire to climb up to them.

Unsure what to do, I called up Sophie, explained my dilemma and they looked at the wooden beams and said “I’m gonna try it”. They were fully about to go up when I suddenly had visions of the beams immediately cracking, sending them plummeting back down to Elliot 10 metres below, so I hastily asked them to just double check that the scary holes with the scary ropes was definitely not the way. They clambered around me, took a look at the traverse and decided however sketchy it was, it definitely wasn’t as bad as those wooden beams, with significantly less consequences if we fell. We clipped into the ropes and bolts with our cowstails on either side and sent everyone else across. Then we found the actual ‘stemple highway’ which had the most pathetic tiny little stemple in the wall.

I was quite horrified that I had so nearly just let Sophie die, so we had a group hug at the top of the ladders and I cursed Sea Moose and Katie to the high heavens. Sophie vowed to cut up and burn those descriptions so no one would ever try and do that again.

We continued on and found cow-arse worms, which was significantly less awful than last year, but still disgusting. Abbie had the genius idea to run down to the Peak connection to wash off in the streamway so after a short fight with the hatch, we hurried down, acutely aware of the time that was now kind of running out for us to make call out. The wash-off was so worth the quick detour it though. I was however then pretty cold most of the whole way out. We decided that I should head out with Elliot to try and cancel callout as quickly as possible, while the other three derigged.

I had the realisation about halfway up Leviathan that I didn’t actually know the way to Router Farm from JH, so if my phone didn’t have signal at the top, we were a bit scuppered. As I waited at the top of Bitch Pitch, I tried to come to terms with the fact that Will was going to have to call cave rescue on us and we would never live down the embarrassment.

Elliot and I got to the bottom of the final pitch at 10:25pm, 35 minutes from callout. I unwrapped my phone so I wouldn’t have to do it in the cold at the top, then raced up. I opened the very heavy lid and clambered out, shouted a rope-free to Elliot and looked around. I spotted a light moving quite quickly and thought, “that could be Will’s car!” I began digging around for my phone again to see if it had signal, then looked up to see the light had gotten a lot closer, and definitely wasn’t a car - it was Will himself!

He ran over and I exclaimed “Oh thank God you’re here!”

He looked at his watch, “Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t you?”

We waited for Elliot, and Tyler was thankfully not far behind him. Will took me and Elliot back to the car then went back for Tyler and back again for Sophie and Abbie. He brought garlic bread in the car and it was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

I had been underground for over 10 hours, and by the time Sophie and Abbie made it out they had been in for 11. So somehow we’d managed to extend the trip by 2 hours from the year before, without doing Ride of the Valkeries or waiting at the wrong junction for ages, which I think is quite impressive and did earn us the Gold on the Doyle of the Week podium.

Epic trip, still highly recommend. Next year we’ll do another major fuck up AND do Ride of the Valkeries and maybe we can get it to 12 hours :)