Creevy Rising, Co. Monaghan...

[Penguin]

A couple of weeks ago Artur and i visited Creevy Rising with the intention of exploring the sump behind the entrance chamber recorded in 1965 by the Irish Caving Club.  To our surprise there wasn't a sump behind the entrance chamber, but a canal passage.  Artur swam down it, looking for a sump.  Eventually the canal became too shallow to swim comfortably so Artur shed one bottle.  We had also reeled out 120 m of line in the passage, and it was still continuing!  Passing a through a low flat-out crawl we reached a boulder choke, and our spirits dropped.  But a small hole beckoned, and i wriggled in, moving some blocks and eventually reached larger passage again.  Calling back to Artur, he shed the rest of his dive kit and followed.  Some more canal reached larger stream passages, with lots of nice stal, particularly in the ox-bows.  Like two boys in a sweet shop we eagerly pressed on.    We reached a junction in the cave, and followed the right one initially, but both passages re-joined.  A little further and the passage became narrow again, with a duck blocked by branches.  I pulled them out and went through to a small chamber and another duck, blocked by a propane gas tank.  A few prods with a stick wouldn't shift it, so i gave it a good kick, and followed it through into another chamber.  Artur joined me.  From this chamber we had the option of another, even smaller duck with a tiny, draughting air gap or a dry, sandy body-sized tube.  Expecting that the tube was an ox-bow, and not fancying the duck we took the tube, until stopped by a sand-bank.  Beyond the sand-bank there appeared to be a T-junction.  We turned back, very happy with our discovery, an estimated 500 m of cave. 

We returned last week to push the cave further.  The water level was about 10 cm lower, and the final duck looked more inviting, so Artur snorkelled through.  To our disappointment he reached daylight, with the river passing through a small shallow pot.  Several shorter lengths of cave broken by shallow pots led upstream to the Mile River. 

Here are some photographs we took...

Al

 

[Roger W]

Impressive.

Where did the propane gas tank come from?  Washed in?

 

[graham]

Nice one guys 

 

[Penguin]

Impressive.

Where did the propane gas tank come from?  Washed in?

Must have been.  It turned out it was only a few metres from the sink.  There was rubbish in the upper part of the cave, including half of a millstone.  The cave appears to sump a lot.

 

[graham]

Penguin

The two sites I have on the database for that area are:

CREEVY CAVE  H 83800 06200 and

QUARRY RISING CAVE H 83400 06100

Is this either of those, I suspect the latter, or is it a different place entirely? Can you give me the Irish caving Club reference & do you & Artur intend publishing a full survey and description anywhere?

With 500 m, you have approximately tripled the amount of recorded cave in Monaghan; a great find.

 

[Penguin]

Penguin

The two sites I have on the database for that area are:

CREEVY CAVE  H 83800 06200 and

QUARRY RISING CAVE H 83400 06100

Is this either of those, I suspect the latter, or is it a different place entirely? Can you give me the Irish caving Club reference & do you & Artur intend publishing a full survey and description anywhere?

With 500 m, you have approximately tripled the amount of recorded cave in Monaghan; a great find.

It's not Quarry Rising, although this feeds the Mile River which eventually flows out of Creevy Rising (locals at the Quarry Rising end called Creevy Rising the Mile Cave, but we first entered it through Creevy Rising). 

For Creevy Cave, the reference is too far north to be Creevy Rising - i don't know if this is a separate cave or just a dodgy reference.  I make it H 838 059 for Creevy Rising.  Irish Caver gives 839059 for what we believe is the same cave.  There is more than a 35 m crawl.  The Irish Caver description of the entrance matches but they must have visited in far higher water level. 

The Irish Caver, The Irish Caving Club Newsletter, first edition, 1965, 'Carrickmacross - ICC survey 1964', W C Shiels. 

It was a bit late to go in the next issue of Descent, but maybe a future one! 

I don't know about tripling Monaghan caves, but certainly a good 30% or more has been added and it is by far the finest and longest! 

(Incidently, Poll'D appears to be lost unless someone knows otherwise...)

 

[graham]

The database I'm working from is Dave Drew's one which can be found at http://www.ubss.org.uk/search_irishcaves.php . It lists 7 caves for Monaghan, only one of which is over 100 m long,

Anyway, your description does not fit that of Quarry Rising in the Irish Sump index (page 11) .

I found your comments on how Quarry rising relates to Creevy Rising a bit difficult to follow. I don't have the Irish Caver reference to hand (though strangely enough I did at one point this morning when I was in the library looking for something completely different). How do these caves relate to Fin McCool's Cave?

It looks like there might be more to be found by diving in this area, though. Good luck to you both.

 

[Penguin]

The database I'm working from is Dave Drew's one which can be found at http://www.ubss.org.uk/search_irishcaves.php . It lists 7 caves for Monaghan, only one of which is over 100 m long,

There were three known large caves in Monaghan:

Aphuca River cave (aka Fin McCool's Cave), about 350 m
Tiragarvan River cave, about 250 m including the extensions beyond upstream sump reported in Irish Sump Index (ISI)
Poll'D, reported in The Irish Caver, 70 m with a 15 m pitch

Now we can add Creevy Rising, 500 m

I found your comments on how Quarry rising relates to Creevy Rising a bit difficult to follow. I don't have the Irish Caver reference to hand (though strangely enough I did at one point this morning when I was in the library looking for something completely different). How do these caves relate to Fin McCool's Cave?

Fin McCool's Cave or Aphuca River cave takes water from the small Lough Aphuca.  This rises - or is believed to rise - through Quarry Rising on the other side of the hill (Fin McCool's Table), where there is an old quarry.  We have discovered a second rising in this quarry, 20 m long crawl to an awkward duck or sump, that is definitely not the Quarry rising reported in the ISI.  To distinguish these we've called them Quarry rising north (the one reported in the ISI) and Quarry rising south.  Both of these flow into a small stream which in turn flows into the Mile River after a very short distance.  Following the Mile River downstream one passes through several short sections of cave linking shallow pots (one section is impassable) and then you come to sink of Creevy Rising cave proper.  This gives 500 m or so of continuous cave to the Creevy rising.  I will try and do a sketch map of the area later if that isn't clear. 

There are some more details of the Quarry risings in Irish Technical Divers Wiki (signature link). 

It looks like there might be more to be found by diving in this area, though. Good luck to you both.

So we hope!  Cheers! 

 

[Penguin]

Some more details of the Monaghan caves are available in J C Coleman's The Caves of Ireland, 1965. 

 

[arturconrad]

Hi Graham

The database I'm working from is Dave Drew's one which can be found at http://www.ubss.org.uk/search_irishcaves.php . It lists 7 caves for Monaghan, only one of which is over 100 m long,


Description of Fin McCool's cave in DD database is result of combining outdated and vague references. Cave was explored by Jack Coleman in 1950' for 50m but then pushed further by J.J.H.Miller in 1960-1961. You can find survey of the cave in Jack's Caves of Ireland (1965). C.R.G Grade 3 survey shows around 250-300m of main passage plus another 100-150m of side passages. Then in 1970's P. Lord dived "the main downstream sump on a 30m base fed line and after 21m entered a large canal passage which he followed for 12m to another sump. The passage is 4.5m wide by 2m high" Irish Sump Index, 1988.  Despite 5 visits in the cave we didn't manage to locate "the main downstream sump".

We suspect that P.Lord was diving in high  water conditions when main passage simply sumped

Anyway, your description does not fit that of Quarry Rising in the Irish Sump index (page 11) .


Quarry Rising described in Irish Sump Index has been successfully located only recently.
Vide http://wiki.technicaldiving.ie/index.php/Quarry_Rising_North


I found your comments on how Quarry rising relates to Creevy Rising a bit difficult to follow. I don't have the Irish Caver reference to hand (though strangely enough I did at one point this morning when I was in the library looking for something completely different). How do these caves relate to Fin McCool's Cave?

1.Stream from Aphuca Lough flows into Fin McCool's Cave. You can follow it for about 200m inside the cave. Inlet Sump pushed by Paul and Al seems to be inlet. Downstream sump still to be located.

2. Two small streams, believed to be the same water sinking in Fin McCool, rise in Quarry Rising South and Quarry Rising North, 80m distant from each other. They join and flow into Mille River.

3. After ~200m Mille River sinks for a distance of ~10-15m (not followed), reappears at one side of 7x3m shallow pool only to sink again at the other side. After another ~50m of subterranean course (explored, through trip done last week, I suspect this is Miller's Creevy Cave, description and Grid Ref match) it reappears again for short 15m distance to sink in series of low ducks which mark beginning of our 500m through trip which ends at Creevy Rising.

Mille is the name of the river
Creevy is the name of townland


It looks like there might be more to be found by diving in this area, though. Good luck to you both.

We believe so    Thanks

Artur

 

[arturconrad]

Oops...I didn't realise you were posting too Al. I hope our answers match each other..

Artur

 

[graham]

Hi Artur

Well done, again!

 

[Penguin]

A short update on Creevy Cave!

The survey is nearing completion with just few small bits to add in, and shows over 900 m of passage at present - the main river cave is a bit longer than we estimated and we have pushed small side passages.  Some leads need a bit of digging and we have found what appears to be a static sump. 

On Thursday (11-06) we walked a bit further north from Creevy to Donaghmoyne Rising, reported by the ICC in 1965 and in the Irish Sump Index, but never properly investigated.  It's now a central landscape feature on Mannan Castle Golf Course but they were only too happy to let us visit their cave.  We weren't really hopeful, as they had carried out some engineering work to improve the rising.  As suspected the rising was sumped, but a tight squeeze opened into a low chamber and from this we followed a 1.5 x 1.5 m passage for 40 m to a depth of -7 m, with visible continuation.    The visibility is over 3 m!   

Some more detail here: http://forum.technicaldiving.ie/index.php?topic=1530.msg9255;topicseen#msg9255

 

[graham]

Now that's a civilised dive site. Keep up the good work, guys.

 

[mrodoc]

Did you have to fish out drowned golf balls in return?

 

[arturconrad]

Did you have to fish out drowned golf balls in return?

Heh...not directly, but we were ask to keep an eye on them....

 

[Penguin]

Some more photos from a couple of visits to Creevy this week...

After some excavation of the floor of the Broken Time Machine passage we passed three progressively tighter squeezes to reach the Great Eastern Chamber, extending the cave by another 17m! A boulder choke and bad air stopped exploration there.

 

[Penguin]

As you may have noticed in the latest issue of Descent, as we surveyed the cave during the summer we discovered that we weren't the first people to enter Creevy Cave.  Not quite so disappointing though, as the previous visitors entered through a souterrain.  They also built a platform and a fireplace in the main stream passage. 

Here are some more of my photos:

The souterrain enters through a wide, low side passage, and must have been constructed over a natural opening into the cave.

A closer view.  The walls are drystone and the roof made of large lintels.  The entrance was deliberately covered over with more large lintels when it was abandoned.  The walled passage is a couple of metres long, and the entrance would have been vertically downwards to the floor of the passage. 

The floor of the natural passage has been deepened and spoil stacked to each side - boulders on the left (seen here), earth and stones on the right. 

The souterrain enters the main stream cave in the largest section of passage, where the stream in normal conditions meanders around gravel banks.  Here a small platform has been raised above the river level by constructing low drystone walls and infilling. 

Platform looking upstream.  The passage leading to the souterrain is on the left below the overhanging rock. 

Upstream end of the platform, with a light in the souterrain passage.

On the platform is a fireplace.

Two pieces of glazed pottery were found in the souterrain passage, a small quantity of ash around the fireplace, and a fair distance downstream and beyond the boulder choke we found half of a millstone. 

We've marked the platform off with blue polypropylene rope, please take care not disturb any of the structures and to drain wellie-water before crawling around. 

Al 

(Last week we returned to Donaghmoyne Rising after a spell of settled weather, unfortunately it appears that the roof is very unstable and has collapsed in the passage, and continues to collapse.  We also explored a cave in the Corleck townland north of Creevy, eventually entering about 15 m of tight passage.  Some more detail here for those interested - http://forum.technicaldiving.ie/index.php?topic=1530.msg10165#msg10165.) 

 

[graham]

Fascinating.

Have you informed the relevant archaeological bods?

 

[Penguin]

Fascinating.

Have you informed the relevant archaeological bods?

We brought a friendly caving archaeologist down to see it and he said he would notify the authorities.