Claire Wilkinson, James, Gill, Christine, Eva, Nadine
(Ex-SUSS) Jess and Ann (TSG/SUSS)
This dates from 2011
but it got lost in cyberspace and I only chanced upon it recently.
In 2011, Sheffield
University Speleological Society celebrated its 50th birthday. In
what must have been a massive feat of organisation, August bank holiday weekend
saw well over 100 members of SUSS, past and present, gather in Castleton to
celebrate. As well as food, drink and
dancing, there was also the offer of ‘gentle trips for retired cavers’ which
sounded like too good an opportunity to miss.
Cavers were
requested to meet at 9.30am at Castleton Rotary centre to meet old friends,
beg, borrow, or hire equipment, and generally remember how everything
worked. Two hours later and a group of
us finally found ourselves en route to Peak Cavern, via the Chapel (TSG Hut),
which just goes to show that the faces and equipment change but the faff factor remains the same. Ann and Jess were our Peak Cavern guides/keyholders from the TSG, while the rest of us were ex SUSS,
some not having been underground since the mid eighties, and Nadine, Eva’s
friend who was visiting the UK from Germany and hadn’t ever been underground
before. For some reason it worked out as
a girlie trip, with James as the token man.
As an aside, the
last time I remember caving with James was probably about 1995 on an aborted
SUSS trip to Juniper Gulf. Stumbling
across a sodden allotment in the rain, we could hear the roar of brown water
thundering down the shaft a considerable time before we actually found the
cave. At this point I decided that something smaller and drier was the order of
the day while a few intrepid souls, James included, braved the gulf. Some hours later, back at the minibus, he
complained of a ‘funny tingling feeling’ in his foot which, on inspection, had
started to turn a gruesome black colour.
Some loose carbide in his wetsuit sock had been merrily fizzing away all
day. Cue a hasty exit to Lancaster Royal
Infirmary for treatment for chemical burns, taking months to fully heal.
Back to the present and Peak Cavern has to have one of the most impressive
entrances in the UK. You wind your way through the village, past tiny crooked
stone cottages, under the shadow of an enormous limestone cliff topped by the
ruined Peveril Castle. The entrance is a huge cleft in the rock; the
setting is made even more gothic by flocks of noisy jackdaws wheeling around,
their cries echoing inside the cave.
The first part of
the cave is a show cave, and we thankfully passed through the turnstile without
parting with the requisite £8.25. I’d
only ever been down Peak Cavern once before, in the mid nineties. At the time ITV had been filming a few scenes
of the Narnia TV series in the cave and had installed a slide at the end of the
show cave for one of the action sequences.
My main memory was of playing on the slide and messing about hurling
huge polystyrene boulders at each other.
A short walk took us
the end of the show cave and through a gate and down the slide, which was
happily still in situ, although the fake boulders have long gone. Easy walking along muddy tunnels took us to
the Buxton water sump and then onto the Mucky Ducks. Ann told us this used to be hands and knees
crawling in water but in February 2010 a terrific flood changed the geography
of the area completely. Now it is
possible to stoop through in waist deep water while a massive sandbank has
appeared in an adjacent chamber.
I found something
oddly oppressive about this part of the cave.
It may be the mud, and the total lack of formations, but it all feels
very dark, and even though it doesn’t seem deep underground, has the air of a
sump that has emptied only a short while before. I couldn’t get my head round where we were in
elevation, but there seemed to be sumps off everywhere in Peak Cavern – big
downstream sumps, little sumps down poky holes, digs in the roof and ropes up avens leading to yet more sumps. Curious place,
Derbyshire.
We stopped to
regroup next to the junction leading off towards Moss Chamber, where Neil Moss
was trapped and died in 1959. It
probably wasn’t the best idea to retell this sad story as Nadine, who had
seemed to be really enjoying her first ever trip underground started to look a
little less happy. A short while later
we came to Surprise View, which is a fixed iron ladder down into the
streamway. It got its name during the
early years of Peak exploration when the divers were exploring Buxton water
sump. The ‘dry’ support team were
surprised to come along this passage and find themselves looking down on the
lights of the divers who had passed the sump and were stomping up the streamway
towards them. Down the ladder follows
one of the most impressive sections of the cave. A huge canyon streamway winds its way in
either direction, its shape changing from a towering canyon into an almost
perfect eye shaped phreatic tube before sumping. Twenty four hours continuous rainfall the previous
day hadn’t
made much of an
impact on the water levels and after inspecting the sump, we enjoyed a pleasant
splash upstream in quite low conditions. At some point the stream disappears
and the passage climbs up into a stop-start scramble over muddy boulders
reminiscent of Easegill, eventually levelling out at a nice gravel beach. Ann told up that the only way forward was a grovelly wet crawl leading to Brown’s chamber. At this point a burst of German from Nadine
at the back of the group was translated as ‘Don’t even start to tell me what
happened to Mr Brown!’
Deciding that
unpleasant ducks could wait for another day we retraced our steps back to
Squaws Junction, climbed up a small waterfall and looped back to the top of
Surprise View, wallowing in lots of sticky, gloopy
mud, worn away into convenient knee shaped grooves. Back at Buxton water sump we were under
strict instructions to take one of the many scrubbing brushes from the side,
get in the sump and clean all the mud off ourselves so that we didn’t dirty the
show cave or tourists on the way out. I
suspected some elaborate practical joke to be broadcast on Youtube
the following day, but no, they were deadly serious, Ann even taking her oversuit off and completing the remainder of the trip in
her furry suit.
Walking out through
the enormous entrance with its streaming sunlight, flocks of birds and steamy
green scented air made me feel that we surely must have emerged in Borneo, not
Derbyshire. Tea and flapjacks at the
Chapel made a pleasant end to an enjoyable trip.
Claire Wilkinson