Sleets Gill Memoire - A personal memoire of Sleets Gill

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Myself and Duncan Muirhead spent several Winter evenings exploring the far reaches of Sleets Gill, in around 1965. As this is written in 2007, my memory may well be at fault, so please feel free to suggest Altzheimers or One over the Eight, provided you can add to my enlightenment! One plods about 400 yards up a hillside, to reach a low arched slot under exposed limestone. When we were there, the entrance was no more than about 4' high, and one crawled down a stony slope, for around 60 yards, to a slightly higher, apparently wet horizontal continuation. Thereafter, the cave opened out into a long, straight almost circular section tunnel, which we believe to be Phreatic in origin. This tunnel had was about 7' high, with a mud floor, which showed evidence of active stream activity.

We had been directed to Sleets Gill by an intrepid older Caver, who told us that he believed that the whole passage flooded to the roof on occasions. He noted he had proved this by wedging timbers vertically in the tunnel, to which he had, with considerable fortitude, attached more than 30 inverted, beer bottle tops! We presumed the fortitude was required to empty more than 2 crates of beer, to obtain the necessary bottle tops, but there may have been more to it than that. With similar fortitude, we decided to repeat the experiment, and on returning a week later, we were quite alarmed to find every bottle top full of water, and concluded that the cave did indeed flood to the roof.

The main Phreatic passage was approximately 500 metres long, but very easy to negotiate, as one had full headroom. At the far end, the passage closed down in some sort of boulder choke, but a small rift was found running off to the left. We thrutched our way through this rift, which became progressively tighter, until despite a couple of return visits, we could find no obvious way forward.

Apart from an incident with a motor Bike, Duncan and I moved onto new pastures, but I do recall emerging soaked through, one night, into a temperature of Minus 6 Centigrade. As we emerged with our headlights still shining, we found our Boiler suits freezing rigid, and with some difficulty, we joged downhill to the car, to partake of some anti-freeze at the local hostelry.

The Geriatric Diver