Seems welsh water are sending apprentices out for jobs in the Draenen entrance series!

A shoddy diversion of the stream with a bit of pipe going through a wall of household bricks and mortar which has failed as you still get soaked going through the squeeze!

Reasonably sure that it was not built to make the squeeze dry for cavers.

I think it may be to stop the bank from undercutting in the wet crawl. I think.... :-\

Sion, as Minion says this has nothing to do with the water going down the slot. The engineering bricks are a work-in-progress towards supporting the huge boulder that forms the roof at that point. The stream is washing away the shale wall on stream left, additional support for the increasingly undercut boulder was considered prudent. Further walling to be added, if you would like to try your hand at neat tidy underground brick laying please feel free to join us on Thursday evening  . If you dont fancy that the next time you are coming up the wet slot, facing the stream flowing towards you, look up and to your right and wonder what is holding up the roof you are about to crawl under.

Could it not of been done by sticking a section of blue pipe higher up to divert the water course rather than a brick wall?

I'm surprised they haven't used concrete!

They used concrete bricks, must be the material of choice!

What was wrong with using loose bits of limestone from within the cave?

No doubt some other whinger would complain about material being removed from further into the cave. Plus the bricks are a whole lot easier to work with when compared to oddly shaped limestone.

Please feel free to join us on our next repair trip if you feel you can do better and want to offer a hand. 

Sion, there is a very long history of debate about Draenen on here... Just be grateful you can still get in and out and only have to look at concrete blocks in passing. With luck the passage wont collapse and a different entrance wont be required

You mean the more natural ones, less likely to need maintenance and are used by bats?

Why waste all this time and effort in that disgusting entrance series?

sion said:

You mean the more natural ones, less likely to need maintenance and are used by bats?

Why waste all this time and effort in that disgusting entrance series?

Click to expand...

Why waste all that time and effort exploring in these awful, wet, and muddy holes?

Also, not disturbing bats sounds like a good plan to me.