Magnetometer Pot - 11 May 2008

Sunday May 11th 2008

Members present: Andrew Gilmartin,  Gary Douthwaite,  John Singleton,  Matt Ewles

My first caving trip to Fountains Fell! We parked up at the farm and took a sweltering 20 min walk up the the cave, which is easily found by following the shallow valley of the (dry) stream. The entrance is a concrete pipe extending from the ground, which is rigged for an easy SRT descent to the thankful coolness of the cave. The entrance chamber was bone dry, which is unusual apparently. We made quick progress down the roped climb down (easy down but more tricky coming back up!) and to the head of the well, with the rather impressive echo.

From there a slightly awkward S-bend follows, and then the wet crawl soon follows from that, starting as only a few inches of water, soon becoming a flat out crawl in several inches, elbow deep (assuming crawling on your hands) and a little unpleasant. Neofleece provides more than adequade warmth. The water level here would not be expected to rise or fall much as a rise in levels and it would simply flow out.

From the end of the wet crawl, the canal is reached, a stooping height waist deep at times short canal, a little intimidating but nothing majorly bad. The dry crawl begins, hands and knees easy going across a cobbled floor. Eventually the traverse to the pitch head of Caton Hall is reached. This pitch is rigged with spits and allows a slightly constricted descent to be made just prior to the jammed boulder down the narrow rift.

From the bottom, we droped down through boulders at the bottom of the rope into a confusing and unusual maze of sharp low crawling-height bedding with several pools and loops around. We found the chimney up towards purgatory/Pendant passage (we think), and this came up into a narrow rift which turned into bedding after several metres. Only Gary looked at this bedding, and after declaring it an exceptionally tight fit we were unsure if we had come the right way. After half an hour of further exploration down in the maze, I located a route passing over the top of several deep pools in the bedding floor, which we believe to be the return route from Pendant/Purgatory. Therefore, that very tight bedding must have been the way on, though from Garys description is sounds maybe too tight.

A speedy exit was made, total time to Caton Hall and back approximately 5 hours, and an excellent trip. A good variety of wetness, dryness, canal, crawling, stooping, prussiking, climbing, traversing, big chambers and tiny wiggles, make this an exciting an varied trip which is fairly easy going, and in future might make an excellent freshers trip for late in the first term (assuming settled weather!).