I enjoyed reading how the late breakfast series in long kin west got its name from wardy.  Does anybody else have any insights into named bits of caves.  Why is battle axe pitch in lost johns. named when all above is religious.  What about squashed chihuahua in king pot.

My contribution is when Pegasus came back after exploring new passage. She was eagerly asked what she had found. Instead of a full description of the passage she merely said ?I have a wet belly?.  Not what her eager fellow explorers wanted to hear.

One of my favourites is ?Green and Smelly Passage?, which makes it sound like a really horrible, dismal place ? more like a sewer than a cave. In fact, Green and Smelly Passage is a lovely bit of cave, and the name is totally misleading; evidently, when the cave was first being explored, cavers on the surface carried out a dye test, introducing fluorescein into a sinking stream, while others set off a smoke bomb in order to carry out a test of where a draughting entrance was likely to go. Underground, explorers in a new passage were suddenly assailed by choking acrid fumes, after which (or possibly before which) the water turned bright green ? so those two attributes were temporary and short lived, and the passage has got a name that (unfortunately?) stuck.

" Mr Trundle's I Scream Parlour ". Found this year and the " screamer " may be identified eventually. Trundling was a favourite practice along the dig in Reservoir Hole. ie rolling boulders back along 30m of the dig.

For Mendip: https://ukcaving.com/board/index.php?topic=5979.0

Here?s are two more (well, not passage names, but nevertheless cave feature names) from the Easegill System . . . both, sadly, now gone:

Platypus Junction
The Plumber?s Nightmare

The former was so-called from a strange piece of rock jutting out into the passage, which had a fancied resemblance to the bill of a duck-billed platypus, albeit on a grand scale, being probably 2?3 feet long and a foot or so wide; unfortunately it?s now broken (I believe you can still see it lying in the stream below where it used to be). So how the hell did it get broken? My best guess is that some twat stood on it and broke it off.

And as for the latter, this used to be an intricate conglomeration of stalactites/helictites, maybe just less than a foot high, that used to adorn Broadway in County Pot. The passage here is perhaps 6 feet high and 7?8 wide, with a false floor on the left-hand side (as you look downstream). The thing is, the false floor juts out some way into the passage and the formation was situated between the roof and the false floor, such that anyone would surmise that the formation would have been protected; but no, some pillock must have reached 2 or 3 feet into this area in order to deliberately break it.

More here (I'm sure there are other threads):
https://ukcaving.com/board/index.php?topic=2776.0

NNoooo          It was such a great feature to show the children as a way-mark on a turning point.

Platypus Junction

The former was so-called from a strange piece of rock jutting out into the passage, which had a fancied resemblance to the bill of a duck-billed platypus, albeit on a grand scale, being probably 2?3 feet long and a foot or so wide; unfortunately it?s now broken (I believe you can still see it lying in the stream below where it used to be). So how the hell did it get broken? My best guess is that some twat stood on it and broke it off.

Click to expand...

Afraid so, Judi; actually, it's been broken for some time now ? probably several years. I suppose that if you were new to the system and walked past it, you wouldn't know that anything was amiss

Fulk said:

Here?s are two more (well, not passage names, but nevertheless cave feature names) from the Easegill System . . . both, sadly, now gone:

Platypus Junction
The Plumber?s Nightmare

The former was so-called from a strange piece of rock jutting out into the passage, which had a fancied resemblance to the bill of a duck-billed platypus, albeit on a grand scale, being probably 2?3 feet long and a foot or so wide; unfortunately it?s now broken (I believe you can still see it lying in the stream below where it used to be). So how the hell did it get broken? My best guess is that some twat stood on it and broke it off.

Click to expand...

I don't suppose it would be possible to fish the broken bit out of the stream and araldite it back in place?

It's quite a substantial chunk of rock, Roger, so I don't think that araldite by itself would be strong enough. It would need holes drilling in the broken piece and the place where it came from, and some kind of rods to hold it together. Quite a tricky task.

Roger W said:

Fulk said:

Here?s are two more (well, not passage names, but nevertheless cave feature names) from the Easegill System . . . both, sadly, now gone:

Platypus Junction
The Plumber?s Nightmare

The former was so-called from a strange piece of rock jutting out into the passage, which had a fancied resemblance to the bill of a duck-billed platypus, albeit on a grand scale, being probably 2?3 feet long and a foot or so wide; unfortunately it?s now broken (I believe you can still see it lying in the stream below where it used to be). So how the hell did it get broken? My best guess is that some twat stood on it and broke it off.

Click to expand...

I don't suppose it would be possible to fish the broken bit out of the stream and araldite it back in place?

Click to expand...

Possibly - but we have attempted to position the most likely candidates, and we cannot get a decent fit. As Fulk says, the damage was caused a long time ago, and I suspect that either the most likely candidate has been subjected to extensive weathering which has rounded off the point of fracture, or more likely,  the beak fractured into more than one fragment.

Here's a picture of it in Oct 2004, if this works. It's the one on the left..!

and here's a closer-up if you want to stick the platypus on again...

An early picture from the Ron Bliss collection, RRCPC library, with a younger Jim Eyre.

That's a much better picture than mine!  Taken from a different angle, but makes me wonder whether it had already suffered some damage when our picture was taken. Or whether our picture was really the platypus at all?! It was taken at Platypus Junction though.

Trogger said:

That's a much better picture than mine!  Taken from a different angle, but makes me wonder whether it had already suffered some damage when our picture was taken. Or whether our picture was really the platypus at all?! It was taken at Platypus Junction though.

Click to expand...

I didn't think your picture was of the Platypus, but I couldn't find a picture of the remnants of the actual one to back that view up. The above is it, but it is now a foot or so shorter.

Does anyone know when it was broken?

I think it was complete in February 1969 when I first went there and I remember that viewed from end-on it widened out at the end like the bill of a platypus.

However, according to my log, it was broken when I next saw it in May 1972.

Dave

Actually I know who the perpetrator is.  He is very remorseful of his action when he was young. He was a pretty wild and hard caver in his day.  A few years ago I gave him a platypus soft toy at a New Year?s Eve party.  He felt ashamed of his Actions on that day and wasn?t pleased to be reminded of the incident. His fellow cavers berated him at the time.  He never damaged a cave after this but he sure was a character above ground.  I was going to say early 70s.  Could easily have been 1971 to tie in with the last post.
Sad
I was hoping for amusing tales of cave passage naming

To get this back on topic and to try to make people smile.....
?Dinosaur Penis Bone Chamber? in Jenga Pot.
While trying to dive and pump sump 1 in Jenga the North York Moors Caving Club and Yorkies were sat in the pub discussing what might lay beyond the sump. An imaginative prospective survey on the back of a beer mat included the as yet undiscovered chamber and imaginary passages that might lay beyond.
Wild Swimming with Prof Alice Roberts had just been on the telly and a discussion ensued as to how The Prof could be enticed into the (Rather Horrific) partly pumped passage. It was decided that the only way this was ever likely to happen would be to find a chamber that contained a Dinosaur Penis Bone.
Unfortunately when the sump broke - we only found a chamber.......

Sorry to backtrack, but this was apparently 2012: