Tangent_tracker
Active member
Good luck, will be watching this with much interest 
Eldon Hole - Trip Report
- Thread starter Mark Wright
- Start date
Mark Wright
Active member
EDB4YLI55,
I don't think anyone has any plans on going down on Sunday but if you find somebody to go down with there is plenty of work to do clearing out all the tree trunks and bits of old angle iron from the miserable crawl through into the Main Chamber and take it out for disposal. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Mark
I don't think anyone has any plans on going down on Sunday but if you find somebody to go down with there is plenty of work to do clearing out all the tree trunks and bits of old angle iron from the miserable crawl through into the Main Chamber and take it out for disposal. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Mark
Mark Wright
Active member
What started off as a three man team soon dwindled to two by the time we got to the bottom of the entrance shaft. The youngest member of todays team had to turn round with complaints of tired arms after completing his IRATA Level 1 course the week before. The problem was he had the water and kettle for the brews in his tackle bag leaving Paz Vale and me, two parched 50 year olds, to save the day with very dry mouths.
We wasted no time in clearing about a tonne of rocks from the entrance to the dig site, most of it being thrown to the bottom of the Main Chamber. The dig is now ready for the first of the scaffolding and boards to go in next week.
Before leaving the Main Chamber we both commented on how few people we thought came down Eldon Hole only to find 6 students from Newcastle University on their way in for a trip into Damocles Rift.
Both the North and West routes are permanently rigged but you will need a 20m rope to get you down to where the permanent rigging starts on both routes. The West route has been rigged with a number of re-belays to facilitate a quicker exit for larger digging teams and easier to transport awkward heavy loads of scaffold tubes and boards using two descenders to zig zag your way through them.
Further digging trips are planned for this coming Tuesday and Thursday evenings with next weekends trip being on Sunday.
I'll keep you all informed of the progress.
Mark
We wasted no time in clearing about a tonne of rocks from the entrance to the dig site, most of it being thrown to the bottom of the Main Chamber. The dig is now ready for the first of the scaffolding and boards to go in next week.
Before leaving the Main Chamber we both commented on how few people we thought came down Eldon Hole only to find 6 students from Newcastle University on their way in for a trip into Damocles Rift.
Both the North and West routes are permanently rigged but you will need a 20m rope to get you down to where the permanent rigging starts on both routes. The West route has been rigged with a number of re-belays to facilitate a quicker exit for larger digging teams and easier to transport awkward heavy loads of scaffold tubes and boards using two descenders to zig zag your way through them.
Further digging trips are planned for this coming Tuesday and Thursday evenings with next weekends trip being on Sunday.
I'll keep you all informed of the progress.
Mark
Brilliant, this is exactly the co-operation and commitment that has yielded some impressive cave finds in the Peak in the last few years. Having had the privilege of delivering the Peaks Round-up (Probably not to everyone's taste but ho hum) I have been staggered at the amount of new stuff that is uncovered year after year. If you have regular digging sessions I may be able to join you and assist as and when I am available on the odd occasion as being over 50 I would seem to qualify...
this is exactly the co-operation and commitment that has yielded some impressive cave finds in the Peak in the last few years. Having had the privilege of delivering the Peaks Round-up (Probably not to everyone's taste but ho hum) I have been staggered at the amount of new stuff that is uncovered year after year. If you have regular digging sessions I may be able to join you and assist as and when I am available on the odd occasion as being over 50 I would seem to qualify...
danthecavingman
Member
Evening all,
Just found this online after a bit of digging around - it's quite interesting - Lloyd's original published account with an addendum by Mr King.
http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/61/250.full.pdf
Good luck with the dig!
Dan.
Just found this online after a bit of digging around - it's quite interesting - Lloyd's original published account with an addendum by Mr King.
http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/61/250.full.pdf
Good luck with the dig!
Dan.
Fafcinating; what ftrikes me is that Mr Lloyd feems to give a fairly objective account of his defcent (even to the depth of ~fixty-two yds, which muft be pretty clofe to the currently accepted depth). Fo ? what a pity . . . becaufe it feems to indicate that the diggerf will have their work cut out, fhifting all that rock that waf fo tragically chucked down there!
Moose
New member
The issue of throwing material down EH is one that puzzles me somewhat.
I can't actually see why, all those years ago, anyone would want to go to the effort of carting several hundreds or even thousands of tons of material across the moor and dispose of it down a big hole in the ground. If it's miners debris we're talking about, it's common practice to dump it almost immediately at the entrance of the mine.
If on the other hand we're talking about walls and even remains of buildings as has also been discussed, in an age where building materials were hard enough to get hold of at the best of times I find it hard to understand why you would want to get rid of it so permanently.
It would be a safer bet to suggest that natural events have caused far greater infill to EH than any efforts of man.
I can't actually see why, all those years ago, anyone would want to go to the effort of carting several hundreds or even thousands of tons of material across the moor and dispose of it down a big hole in the ground. If it's miners debris we're talking about, it's common practice to dump it almost immediately at the entrance of the mine.
If on the other hand we're talking about walls and even remains of buildings as has also been discussed, in an age where building materials were hard enough to get hold of at the best of times I find it hard to understand why you would want to get rid of it so permanently.
It would be a safer bet to suggest that natural events have caused far greater infill to EH than any efforts of man.
nickwilliams
Well-known member
Similar thoughts crossed my mind in the early stages of the Bullpit dig. A lot of what we took out looked a lot like walling stone, but I can't for the life of me see why anyone would dump it there. OTOH, I can't see a credible natural mechanism for it to get there either. But then I'm a physicist/engineer so perhaps someone with a better knowledge of rockology could come up with something?
graham
New member
People do throw rocks down holes, of that there is no doubt. My impression has always been that a dry stone wall was long ago constructed around Eldon Hole, presumably for safety reasons, and that this was steadily chucked down the Hole over a period of time, being added to as the landowner/tenant/whoever played a losing game of repairing against passers by intent on mindless amusement.
On a much smaller scale, I've seen a similar thing on Mendip. When we cleared out the Longwood Main Sink, much of what we removed was the remains of the drystone wall that Rich Witcombe built around the sink a couple of decades back, at the behest of SWT. After we removed it, the stone was transported a little way down valley & used in the construction of the dam & retaining wall at Longwood Valley Sink. Fortunately, there, it is not a free standing wall as before but incorporated into a bank & thus less likely to be picked up by passers-by & dropped. There's no convenient deep hole or pool to splash stones into, either.
On a much smaller scale, I've seen a similar thing on Mendip. When we cleared out the Longwood Main Sink, much of what we removed was the remains of the drystone wall that Rich Witcombe built around the sink a couple of decades back, at the behest of SWT. After we removed it, the stone was transported a little way down valley & used in the construction of the dam & retaining wall at Longwood Valley Sink. Fortunately, there, it is not a free standing wall as before but incorporated into a bank & thus less likely to be picked up by passers-by & dropped. There's no convenient deep hole or pool to splash stones into, either.
Les W
Active member
Plenty of examples of walling being bulldozed on Mendip, lots of depressions filled in with walling stone to level the ground and make larger fields...
Walling stone is not necessarily that good for building and years back the stone walls were not valued as part of the landscape, nor protected.
Farmers found them a nuisance to maintain, unlike nice barbwire fences and they were a liability then not a source of income as they are now...
Walling stone is not necessarily that good for building and years back the stone walls were not valued as part of the landscape, nor protected.
Farmers found them a nuisance to maintain, unlike nice barbwire fences and they were a liability then not a source of income as they are now...
alastairgott
Well-known member
Aye, then again, i'm sure there was a photo in descent with a wall in when the original posts were put in by the old boys from crewe like shotlighter.
Edit: sure i saw it in one of the descent refs listed in the guide: http://www.peakdistrictcaving.info/caveguides/eldon_hole.pdf
Edit: sure i saw it in one of the descent refs listed in the guide: http://www.peakdistrictcaving.info/caveguides/eldon_hole.pdf
shotlighter
Active member
Cheeky swine :tease:alastairgott said:
EDIT mind you it could have been worse, at least you didn't include "decrepit" as well as "old" in your description!
pwhole
Well-known member
Don't forget there's meant to be a dead guy and his horse buried down there somewhere too - thrown down by a highwayman after he robbed him, apparently. I don't know for certain what arrangements for access existed in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, but I'm guessing that if you weren't the farmer or a lead miner on one of the nearby veins, you probably shouldn't have been up there at all. I've often wondered how many 'tourists' actually tramped the plateau back in 1770. Can't have been that many.
dudley bug
Member
Best of luck with the dig, this is a really great project.
Here is another old reference from "Caves of the Earth" published by the Religious Tract Society in 1847 pp17-18 follows
Here is another old reference from "Caves of the Earth" published by the Religious Tract Society in 1847 pp17-18 follows