Ogof Llyn Parc - 14 Jun 2008
Saturday June 14th 2008
Members present: Andrew Vick, Andrew Gilmartin, Gary Douthwaite, Imogen Shepherd, Kevin Francis, Lauren Ellis, Laz Abbott, Matt Ewles, Nicola Gover, Richard Gover
Report by Laz Abbott
We arrived at the entrance which is right nice and close to the side of the road to find that the entrance scaffold had already been erected. All we knew was that the entrance was somewhere up the top of a hill and that there would be cars parked nearby. Without the cars, it would have been a right pain to find because there's nothing obvious from the road!
The winch was quite impressive, comprising a winch drum, a stationary engine, and a hydraulic pump and drive. This had the advantage that descent wasn't just free-fall with a little bit of braking: both ascent and descent were powered. Even so, the wire looked very thin compared with a rope!
Gover had a go at trying to start the winch engine and failed. I succeeded! :p
The first person down was one of the NWCC(?) people who took down a field telephone for signalling when to start the winch. We then decided that Gary's car should go first (to test it before we went down!), and from that, Andy V was quickly voted in as guinea pig. As the rest of the group followed, our group sat around in the sun chatting and throwing a stick for someone's dog. After a while, we thought we'd better get changed.
We were told that the round-trip for the winch was bout 6 minutes or so: I timed myself and it was about 2 minutes on the way down and just under 2 minutes on the way up. A lot quicker than prussicking! I had thought that descent and ascent on the winch would be a tad unnerving but was actually quite good fun. The shaft was lined for the top 10 m or so and then rougher lower down but still fairly regular and about 5 foot in diameter. Several mine levels are passed on the way down and my feet brushed against the sides at a few points. The important thing here is not to push yourself away harshly otherwise you bounce back and forth across the shaft all the rest of the way down or up! Gentle fending...
The bottom of the 300 foot entrance pitch ends at a wooden and scaffolding platform: the shaft used to go a further 100 foot but was either filled in or has collapsed. The way on is a squeeze through a boulder choke and then down a series of 4 fixed iron ladders which bypass the bottom part of the shaft and then rejoin it at the bottom. Each ladder was quite a distance... :s OK if you don't look up or down!
At the bottom of the ladders, the thigh-deep (but just below [[em]]the unmentionables[[/em]]) water then begins for about 100 m with a couple of short boulder chokes. After a final boulder choke, the main stream passage is reached. There is some really cool copper-plate graffiti scraped in the mud on the ceiling which was done by the miners about 100 years back! Pretty surprising it hasn't been washed away because a lot of the cave floods in winter.
From here, we did a round trip including a section up Fault Inlet. I won't try to describe it because I can't remember the route! Looking at the survey afterwards didn't really enlighten me, either!
The cave has a lot of big, stompy passages, quite a few slippery muddy slopes (some with fixed lines in place), some really nice phreatic passages (half-filled with lots of sand which gets washed about every winter), quite a few stals and curtains, and also a few fossils.
After we'd completed the round-trip, we met up with the other group who were washing off some of the mud in a pool. To waste a bit of time while they went up on the winch, we had a look at a couple of other bits. First we went down the tunnel that the miners had entered the cave through: this was a brick-lined stooping tunnel which ended at a cave-in after about 10 metres or so. Next we headed through a very dodgy-looking boulder-choke to The Quarry. This turned out to be a huge passage about 10 meters wide with a [[b]]VERY[[/b]] scary roof. Scary because huge sections about a foot thick had fallen down across most of the width of the passage. We followed the taped route (supposedly the safe route...) down the centre. Team Gary's Car told us that they had gone as far as the end of the tape. Obviously, we made sure that we went further than them. ;) We reached the second boulder-choke which we were informed was even more dodgy than the previous one! No one really fancied testing its stability so we headed back to the wet bit, the ladders, and then back up the winch to daylight. Once changed, we helped to dismantle the scaffolding at the entrance and hook the winch up to a Landrover.
An excellent trip all round, and much better not having to do the entrance pitch by man-power alone (or woman-power!). The cave has something like 6 km of passageway but still hasn't been fully explored. Our guide spotted some new bits he hadn't noticed before as we went round.
Back to the Old Schoolhouse place where we played a comedy game involving lots of laughing at Gover's expense! ;)
Both Lauren and I were convinced that the Old Schoolhouse was haunted! We both heard various bangs and noises in the night coming from the kitchen area! Didn't see anything, apart from the ghostly apparition of a pair of glowing white grundies floating across the room when Lauren sent Andy G to see if anyone had broken in! Maybe it was a ghost of either Ben and the other kid (whose name I can't remember) who had their names scrawled across the wall of one of the old sheds in blood...
