For Reading University Caving Club's second weekend trip of this autumn term, we headed back to the West Country to once again visit The Belfry. After a heavy night (I was able to guage how people were feeling from the pained grunts and bleary eyed, thousand-yard-stares the next morning), thankfully Ben, our resident cooking wizard, was on hand to serve up a magnificent fry-up breakfast to serve as pre-caving damage control.
For Saturday?s caving exploits, our group consisting of more experienced cavers headed for the caverns of GB Cave with the intention of exploring it comprehensively.
We spent some time discussing the origin of this cave?s name, and it turns out it was named after two cavers, Goddard and Barker, who were responsible for exploring and mapping great swathes of the caverns in the 1930s; it was not, as we speculated, discovered by ?Great Britain? in some surrealist story of self-aware landmasses. The more you know!
After a worryingly long time spent discussing how we?d reach our destination, we piled into the minibus and set off for the cave entrance. This was the first time I'd visited GB, despite having heard plentiful stories about previous trips into its chambers and tunnels, and I was excited to discover the system for myself.
While passing the old, now collapsed entrance didn?t kindle much confidence (?The rest of the cave is more stable, right??), we eventually came to a shed-like structure, hidden in a depression in a nearby field and shielded by a grove of trees. Through this door, we descended into a vast, gaping opening in the ground which led us down into the first twisting tunnels of the cave proper.
As always with caving groups, the small talk as we clambered swung wildly from the profound to the debauched, from discussions of Welsh princes, the processes of formation at work around us and talk about the fascinating fossils embedded in millions of years of strata, to whether ?glittery rocks? was more apt as a descriptive term or a potential porn name, and which of the stalagmites and ?tites seemed most phallic.
Eventually we emerged into the vast main chamber of the cave, where we rested on an overhanging ledge and took in the sweeping underground space we found ourselves in. It was staggering to explore a cave with such grand open spaces, especially after the comparative squeeziness of OFD and Cwm Dwr, which we explored on our previous club weekend.
With this increased space came a greater view of the formations surrounding us from the outset; in traversing floors of flowstone, we spotted features which resembled calcite coral topped with minute quartz crystals, and icy-white cascades of calcite frozen on the expansive walls of this first sprawling chamber.
We continued our journey through a roundabout route of tight crawls and squeezes, eventually reaching the now mostly-dry sump and the ladder pitch, where another passing collection of cavers generously helped us set up our equipment for an ascent into an optional but stunning area of GB.
After contorting our way through a particularly damp (read: saturating) crawlspace, we found ourselves in Bat Passage, flanked by calcite in curtains and ice-cream-esque globules, before backtracking into the Great Chamber. This stunning open cavern contained an array of stalagmites and ?tites, some of which had merged into columns (and one which displayed a clean break through its centre, indicative of the earth?s movement sometime in its lifetime), and flowstone like frozen waterfalls, stretching up into the blackness of the vast, inclining chamber.
We were able to spend a good half an hour admiring the view atop the boulders like from the peak of a subterranean mountain, before detouring back into ?Disappointment Chamber?. This was apparently the space where some of the best-laid trips grind to a halt, as parties find themselves here in search of the Great Chamber and don?t know how best to continue. Even though we?d already discovered the main cavern, we decided to poke our heads into this space anyway ? there?s always time for some disappointment.
On our return journey, we shortened the trip considerably by scaling the waterfall in the main chamber, admiring the millennia of preserved creatures embedded in the rock as we went, before taking another detour to the top of the Gorge, climbing, slipping and sliding through the mud.
This route took us to the space just below the collapsed former entrance, where the cave?s previous owners, Bristol Waterworks, had dumped all manner of artificial debitage in the late 60?s in an attempt to seal the breach. This malaise of items happened to include old cars, and as we reached the summit of our climb, we began to discover more and more fragmented pieces of bumper and bodywork.
We also discovered a mud-coated glass bottle containing a mysterious, carbonated clear liquid, and the nature of this liquid became to source of much speculation. Ascribing to video gaming logic, we decided that a mysterious bottle at the end of a cave would surely be some kind of stamina-restoring potion or some magical disease cure.
Unfortunately, when we applied a more grounded logic, we also considered the possibility that a caver had been caught short at the end of his adventures, and that we had in fact discovered a bottle of fermented piss. The bottle made it out of the cave with us, as we emerged into the rural twilight. I?m pretty sure I remember seeing it in The Belfry later on that evening, too, but beyond then, I?m not sure what the mystery bottle?s final fate was. Part of me isn?t sure if it wants to know, either...
Overall, I?d say we had a cracking trip ? I think everyone got the chance to revisit an old favourite or discover something new and exciting!
For Saturday?s caving exploits, our group consisting of more experienced cavers headed for the caverns of GB Cave with the intention of exploring it comprehensively.
We spent some time discussing the origin of this cave?s name, and it turns out it was named after two cavers, Goddard and Barker, who were responsible for exploring and mapping great swathes of the caverns in the 1930s; it was not, as we speculated, discovered by ?Great Britain? in some surrealist story of self-aware landmasses. The more you know!
After a worryingly long time spent discussing how we?d reach our destination, we piled into the minibus and set off for the cave entrance. This was the first time I'd visited GB, despite having heard plentiful stories about previous trips into its chambers and tunnels, and I was excited to discover the system for myself.
While passing the old, now collapsed entrance didn?t kindle much confidence (?The rest of the cave is more stable, right??), we eventually came to a shed-like structure, hidden in a depression in a nearby field and shielded by a grove of trees. Through this door, we descended into a vast, gaping opening in the ground which led us down into the first twisting tunnels of the cave proper.
As always with caving groups, the small talk as we clambered swung wildly from the profound to the debauched, from discussions of Welsh princes, the processes of formation at work around us and talk about the fascinating fossils embedded in millions of years of strata, to whether ?glittery rocks? was more apt as a descriptive term or a potential porn name, and which of the stalagmites and ?tites seemed most phallic.
Eventually we emerged into the vast main chamber of the cave, where we rested on an overhanging ledge and took in the sweeping underground space we found ourselves in. It was staggering to explore a cave with such grand open spaces, especially after the comparative squeeziness of OFD and Cwm Dwr, which we explored on our previous club weekend.
With this increased space came a greater view of the formations surrounding us from the outset; in traversing floors of flowstone, we spotted features which resembled calcite coral topped with minute quartz crystals, and icy-white cascades of calcite frozen on the expansive walls of this first sprawling chamber.
We continued our journey through a roundabout route of tight crawls and squeezes, eventually reaching the now mostly-dry sump and the ladder pitch, where another passing collection of cavers generously helped us set up our equipment for an ascent into an optional but stunning area of GB.
After contorting our way through a particularly damp (read: saturating) crawlspace, we found ourselves in Bat Passage, flanked by calcite in curtains and ice-cream-esque globules, before backtracking into the Great Chamber. This stunning open cavern contained an array of stalagmites and ?tites, some of which had merged into columns (and one which displayed a clean break through its centre, indicative of the earth?s movement sometime in its lifetime), and flowstone like frozen waterfalls, stretching up into the blackness of the vast, inclining chamber.
We were able to spend a good half an hour admiring the view atop the boulders like from the peak of a subterranean mountain, before detouring back into ?Disappointment Chamber?. This was apparently the space where some of the best-laid trips grind to a halt, as parties find themselves here in search of the Great Chamber and don?t know how best to continue. Even though we?d already discovered the main cavern, we decided to poke our heads into this space anyway ? there?s always time for some disappointment.
On our return journey, we shortened the trip considerably by scaling the waterfall in the main chamber, admiring the millennia of preserved creatures embedded in the rock as we went, before taking another detour to the top of the Gorge, climbing, slipping and sliding through the mud.
This route took us to the space just below the collapsed former entrance, where the cave?s previous owners, Bristol Waterworks, had dumped all manner of artificial debitage in the late 60?s in an attempt to seal the breach. This malaise of items happened to include old cars, and as we reached the summit of our climb, we began to discover more and more fragmented pieces of bumper and bodywork.
We also discovered a mud-coated glass bottle containing a mysterious, carbonated clear liquid, and the nature of this liquid became to source of much speculation. Ascribing to video gaming logic, we decided that a mysterious bottle at the end of a cave would surely be some kind of stamina-restoring potion or some magical disease cure.
Unfortunately, when we applied a more grounded logic, we also considered the possibility that a caver had been caught short at the end of his adventures, and that we had in fact discovered a bottle of fermented piss. The bottle made it out of the cave with us, as we emerged into the rural twilight. I?m pretty sure I remember seeing it in The Belfry later on that evening, too, but beyond then, I?m not sure what the mystery bottle?s final fate was. Part of me isn?t sure if it wants to know, either...
Overall, I?d say we had a cracking trip ? I think everyone got the chance to revisit an old favourite or discover something new and exciting!
