i may have inadvertantly misstated my tendencies......i carry equipment for the people who do that sort of cave activity.....(diving)......cave divers ARE nuts......i will descend hundreds of meters in airfilled passage, toting bags of flippers and carefully carrying tanks.....crawl till i puke dragging wetsuits, masks and regulators so that they can do that crazy stuff........BUT I AIN'T GOING INTO THAT WATERFILLLLLLLLLED HOLE!........i agree completely, anytechniquetheyuuuuz iz not4me!!....and, anything the english, french,dutch,spanish,russian, chinese, er anybody else does won't be good enough to tempt me to do anything except be willing to wait and shiver while they get the glory....or worse..... what i like are caves that involve swimming and doing near sumps....or wet multidrop stuff.......i have always felt that horizontal cave wuz to be tolerated to reach the next pit.....but truthfully as i have matured.....i think it, like women, iz all good...... there iz an active cave scene in the you sss......you can do social caving, grotto and national groups functions, rescue, that sort of scene.....club stuff..be a groupie caver...or an outlaw type... the golden age of cave exploration iz long gone.....stuff iz still found and stuff that surprises you that its that good is still dug up and blasted into.....but.....the golden age is gone..... every single cave trip i have gone on this year has had a gathering of cavers as the reason.....last weekends trip was stimulated by my grotto's annual auction....i bought a selflocking biner way to strong for what i nneed and a plate circa 60's-70's for shasta caverns........ the biggest development over here in the last 10 years or so has to have been the idea of cavers pooling their money and purchasing caves!......its gotten to the point to where you can do just about anysort of cave via contacting this guy who represents this club you pay fifteen bucks a year to.....he gives you permission and whatever else to go to these cool caves.....wow....all i wuz after wuz a place to be able to camp each weekend that belonged to cavers!.... ...the concept of group grotto dig projects has not been realized over here yet.....there are hundreds of digs all over TAG......and rare iz the grotto that officially organizes a dig project!.......very rare....its really nutz to me......
As far as Mendip goes - I'm presuming you are after classic trips not the nasty and hard to forget ones (hey, perhaps that's a new definition of "classic"?) - the bleedin' obvious includes Swildon's Hole Round Trip and St. Cuthburt's Swallet to Sump 2; since conservation is a consideration nowadays (which it rightly ought to be) it's best to stick to caves and routes which can take traffic although if it was pretties you were after the list would alter - I'm not saying, by inference, that the two caves listed are not pretty - they've some spectacular stuff, spesh Cuthburts. :shock:
