Red
Rose Cave and Pothole Club - Newsletter Vol. 6 No. 6 - November 1969
Week-end 1-2 November, 1969.
PARTY:- Tony Higham, Tony Tanner, Chris Cleary, Ray Enderby,
Bob Ross, Alan Massey, Howard Fordham
.
IN SUPP0RT:- John McCarthy, Alan Povey
.Our second visit to Bullpot - determined to bottom Alum during this trip. An “early” start saw us at Selside
at 10.30 a.m. on Saturday in pouring rain. Just why we don’t like getting wet “upstairs’ before a sure drenching
“downstairs’, I have never fathomed. We had decided to do our trip via Long
Churn seeing that this was the intention on the previous visit. Half an hour was spent lowering
some ladders and ropes for the 60’ pitch and onwards, down the main pitch of Alum,. We
also lowered an insulated container of’ hot soup and six tin mugs secured in an
old Army kit-bag. All these separate “drops” were secured to the tree and we
made our way down to them via Long Churn. All went very well and we were all reasonably dry before descending the 60’
pitch. There was not a lot of water going over the cascades and only two sheep!
I remembered the
way down into the final chamber via the passage on the left, and I hope,
suitably impressed by that terminal chamber. One had to shout to be heard above
the thunder of the Diccan waterfall. The sump level
had only recently gone down as there were rings of foam to about eight feet above the water level. Wedged. in the cracks of the rock high overhead were
tins and plastic bottles and right up in the roof at least 35’- 40’ above our heads was a great baulk of timber
jammed into the rocks. We were all suitably impressed when we considered the
force of the water required to ram a large, thick walled, metal tank, now resting buckled and half buried in the chamber floor, from so far above. All of us were more
than impressed when we realised that this chamber must fill to the roof to account for the
timber way above our heads. With these thoughts in mind, we made our way back up to the hot soup and thus
fortified, we returned to the surface to discover that it had stopped raining.
Back at Bullpot
that night, (or early Sunday morning) after a visit to the Local, Ron Bliss
showed us his slides and guess what - all our party were greatly
impressed.
Tony Tanner.