CHARLIE SELF RIP

rhychydwr1

Active member
Charlie Self  5 November 1951 to 4 February 2016

Hopefully a UBSS type will write an Obit. otherwise I can do one.
 

mrodoc

Well-known member
Attended his funeral recently. Charlie was indirectly responsible for the discovery of the extensions to Cave of the Wild Horses in Kilcorney in Eire (amongst many other achievements) when we visited the cave to check it out for a new guide to Clare over 30 years ago. As I was the one with a wet suit he  sent me down a passage supposedly ending in a line of ducks that turned out to end in  a pitch into a new lower series to the system.
 

rhychydwr1

Active member
OBITUARIES By Andy Tyler

CHARLIE SELF 05/11/51-04/02/16

Charlie Self died of cancer on 04/02/16, Charlie was famous for publishing "The Caves of County Clare, a  member of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society (UBSS) he was a geologist and chemist.  I first met him soon after I started caving at the 1989 IUS Symposium in Budapest.  It was there he met some Russian scientists, Vladimir Maltsev and others, and 18 months later joined them on a mineralogical expedition in Kup-Koutan cave in Turkmenistan (which is compared with Llechuquilla Cavern New Mexico) then still part of the USSR, being a desert environment and a long cave meant camping for a month ?n the cave.  It was there he met his wife Galia from Moscow; they have one daughter Antonia.  Before he went to Turkmenistan we went on a expedition to the Picos de Europa along with some other UBSS members.  We were exploring the Naciemento del Aqua the principal resurgence of the Eastern Massive, this was a mineralogical research expedition. After the Picos we drove to Brno in the Czech Republic for a symposium on Pseudo Karst, his other main caving interest. From there we drove home via the DDR on its last day before it became Germany.
We also did an expedition to Co. Clare surveying some loose ends e.g. The Tomeens He did a further expedition to Turkmenistan and to Pinega near Archangel in Northern Russia where there is gypsum karst which involved skiing to and is flooded in the winter.  He has published about 50 papers on cave minerals and slip rifts of the Cotswolds and Avon valley e.g. Whitchurch Farm Rifts (CSS vol57 No 3 to 6.  In 1976 he was part of the overland Kulu  mountaineering expedition to the Indian Himalaya achieving two first ascents of 4,000 peaks.  At university he edited the students? magazine PRIVATE Ear, went on an expedition to Slovenia ands was first to abseil off the Clifton Suspension Bridge!

From Chelsea Speleological Society Newsletter 58 (1-3) Jan?March 2016, 13 with kind permission.

 

Andy Farrant

Active member
There will be a longer version in the upcoming issue of UBSS Proceedings. And of course the BCRA field trip to the Box stone mines on the 23rd Oct (after the Cave Science Symposium) will be in Charlie's memory.
 
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