Roger Kirk Cave - 26th Apr 2009

Sunday April 26th 2009

Members present: Catherine Moody,  Chuck Holder,  Mark Sims

My intro to train caving! Ade had bailed out on us claiming that he needed sleep (that boy always needs sleep! :p), leaving us with no driver… A last minute decision was made that as Mark, Chuck and I all still wanted to go caving, we’d get the train to Ribblehead and have a potter round a few of the smaller caves there, scout out some alternative fresher trips and hopefully be guaranteed not to miss the train back again. After a quick trip to the container on Saturday to pick up supplies, I stopped off at Chuck’s house to drop off a battery belt and we discussed the possibility of having a picnic in the Dales. Wanting any excuse for a revision break, he joined me on a wander to Morrisons (where he said he would disown me for carrying the rucksack and making him look ungentlemanly..) and we bought LOTS of food. Yum yum!

We were due to meet at the station at half 7. Impeccable/coincidental timing saw me reach the top of the steps at Lendal Bridge at the same moment the other 2 walked past. At the station, Chuck amused himself by telling the woman at the counter all about our plans for the day. He tried to do the same with the guard at Leeds station but I don’t think he was particularly interested. Whilst Chuck and Mark “revised” on the train, I attempted to get some kip, but gave up after they inevitably threatened to draw on my face…

We arrived into sunny Ribblehead at 10.25 and after a leisurely change, left our bags with the lovely people at the Station Inn and sauntered down the hill in search of some holes in the ground. The original idea was to use Chuck’s I-penis as a GPS, into which he’d entered all the grid references of the caves in the area. Slight flaw in the plan – the I-penis didn’t have any signal! As a result we had to rely on the print-out from google maps, which had us counting the arches in the viaduct as a vague reference point and then running about back and forth til we found something… After a short while we found the entrances to Roger Kirk and decided that before exploring inside, we’d have our picnic while the sun was still out. It was an awesome picnic. Baguettes, teacakes, salami, 3 choices of cheese, crisps, dandelion and burdock and of course plastic cups and paper plates.

After a sufficient amount of time sunbathing, we packed the rest of the food away, re-dressed and headed to the closest entrance, Roger Kirk 4. To the right, the cave extends a few metres until reaching a wet bit round the corner. We agreed it was a bit too wet for that early on in the day so tried the other way. Mark went first through the narrow passage which pointed towards the next entrance, RK3, which we knew to be just round the corner. As we couldn't be bothered to follow, Chuck and I exited and went to RK3 to see if we could see/hear him. Sure enough a couple of minutes later he emerged, complaining that he was tired already from trying to keep himself dry..

Those 2 entrances exhausted, we headed up to Roger Kirk 2 which opened at the bottom of a fairly sizeable sink-hole (the first 2 entrances you could easily miss). There were 2 possible directions, we went left (south) first into a kind of a rifty chamber with some baby formations. The rift was quite narrow and required a lot of squeezing. I was expecting it to join up with RK4 but it seemed to go on for ages and with all the twists and turns we completely lost track of which direction we were pointing. Eventually it got to a low wet bit. The boys were being complete wusses and didn’t want to get soggy but I ploughed on to see if it did indeed join up. After a few metres of wet crawl, it went slightly uphill and got slightly drier but much narrower. I was on my side, shuffling along the floor. I got a fair way but then reached a small ledge. Round the corner I could see it was still very narrow so as I had pretty much zero room to manoeuvre anyway, didn’t see the point in trying to get past and made my retreat. (Plus if I’d got myself wedged, which was highly likely, the other 2 would only moan that Id made them get wet by coming to rescue me!) Back at the entrance, we tried the other direction. Again rifty but this time a bit wider. It got to some deepish wet bits and this time I made the boys follow me as we were fairly certain now that this way did link up to RK4 – indeed it did! Haha they now had wet feet! I was fairly soaked from earlier, but it didn’t matter cos it was sunny outside :)

Next we headed up to Roger Kirk 1. This was nasty!! Very low, almost flat out crawling the whole way and a couple of semi-awkward squeezes. Nothing of interest to see, definitely not one for the freshers!

We decided to sack off Roger Kirk West and go off in search of Thistle instead as we’d heard it was rather more interesting!