Caving Quotes

GarDouth

Administrator
I saw this topic on a Facebook group and have unashamedly stolen it for UKC because I thought it was really interesting but being Facebook it's a bit international.

What is your favourite quote from a well known caver, caving publication or similar?

"Is anybody not ready?"
 

Pitlamp

Well-known member
How about: "That aven's so high it's sticking out above projected moor level!".

(Said of Titan, on the day it was found, 1st Jan 1999.)
 

PeteHall

Moderator
"The Devil is a Gentleman" Bob Davies 11th December 1955 (at 5am after narrowly surviving his dive to Chamber 13 in Wookey Hole)

He went back into the cave (diving) later that day to recover kit that had been abandoned!  :eek:
 

langcliffe

Well-known member
"This cavern is in our parish, and you have no right to be here at all" - Thomas Hardy from Our exploits at West Poley
 

Pitlamp

Well-known member
"If yer weren't hard, you shouldn't 'ave come!"

Ken Pearce (allegedly) in the Berger, some time in the 60s - and by a lot of other cavers since then. (The story goes that someone had very politely asked if Ken would mind awfully if he removed his foot from that person's hand which he was standing on. Or that might relate to a different quote of Ken's: "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's caving with soft people.")

(There may be a few folk on this forum who were actually there and could verify some of the above.)
 

GarDouth

Administrator
"Until this afternoon, whatever lies round that bend has been as remote as the headwaters of the Amazon, as remote as the last uncharted Himalayan peak. Man has set foot on the moon, but here no scientific equipment has ever probed, no satellite has ever scanned. Yet this is England, on a September afternoon, quarter of a mile from the layby where you left the car and half an hour's drive from home.

You are about to enter the unknown..."

- Memoirs of a Moldywarp by Pete Ryder
 
Northern Caves

"This book is intended as guidance for the wise, not the obedience of fools"

I've pinched that quote a lot over the past year.
 

Fulk

Well-known member
Overheard on a cave rescue: ?You?re not supposed to say, ?The patient looks a bit peaky? when said patient is awake and within hearing range?.
 

PeteHall

Moderator
"Why do you do this for fun?" My wife on one of the rare occasions she agreed to go into a cave (we left the cave after that and went to pick blackberries in the sunshine).
 

Trogger

Member
Coleridge wasn't a caver as far as I know, but how often have his words been used? - "...where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea."
 

Pitlamp

Well-known member
In late 1979 cave diving was once again allowed in Peak Cavern, after about a 10 year hiatus when the previous generation of CDG members had fallen out with the Custodian at the time. We have Jerry Murland and the late John Beck to thank for brokering the new access arrangements. There then followed a period of intense exploratory effort which led to some very important breakthroughs. In the April 1980 Cave Diving Group Newsletter, Oliver Lloyd wrote:

"Peak Cavern is like a bottle of fizz, that has been kept stoppered for 10 years. Now that the cork has been taken out, the results are sparkling."
 

Pitlamp

Well-known member
. . . and another one from the late, great, Oliver Lloyd:

"People can only call you a ruddy fool when you've failed - and we haven't!"

These words were uttered after receiving critical comments about the first free diving trip to Swildons 9.
 

droid

Active member
'But you aren't meant to need a lifeline on a 20foot ladder'

'You aren't meant to fall off the bugger either'
 
From Jim Eyre's - The Easegill System

"Within seconds, the loose sods were pulled up and a howling draught blew soil into the air and George Cornes into cave history"
 
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