Our first port of call was Quarry No2 Dig, this is immediately to the west of Marden. Getting to it was a challenge, the undergrowth was fairly dense and it took a while to locate the original route through to the entrance door. This still had last year’s leaves banked up against its base so we were the first to visit in there in a long time. I had forgotten how involved the entrance timbering was, I slowly wormed my way down though the access dig and eventually emerged into the main chamber. This was as I remembered it although I was surprised to find that beyond there is another squeeze and then another large open space. All of the open void is above the original quarry level and between the roofstone bad and another bed of hard stone some 4-5 feet above this; the Upper Roofstone Bed.
We were just about to crawl on into this section when Alan called out that he had spotted a bat. I paid little attention until he said that it was swimming! Turning back to look we saw a bucket left by the diggers that had filled with water and floating in it was a bat. At first we assumed it was dead, but then it started swimming. There seemed no way it could get out, and with sodden wings and fur it did not seem likely that it would be able to fly; we opted to rescue it and carefully lifted it out onto a rock to which it clung feebly. We left it near the entrance to see if it would recover whilst we looked at the rest of the site. At the far end the gallery continues into a partially collapsed and fairly unstable crawl. This seemed a lot smaller than I remembered and I suspect that part of it has fallen in during the last year or so. This gallery continues on to Marden and it is likely that a sound connection exists as we are very close to the entrance chamber.
We made our way back out and found the bat just as we had left it; it was obviously in a bad way, and too wet to be likely able to dry itself, and certainly not underground where it would surely die of hypothermia; so we took it out to the surface and found a warm dry spot near the entrance where it would have a better chance of recovering. There was enough shelter that it should be safe from predators and have a chance to dry out before nightfall.
