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Leck Fell - Elevation

Steve Clark

Well-known member
Whilst thinking about projected and extended elevations on the other paper survey thread, it reminded me a of a great example I’d seen on cavemaps :


Waltham survey with a great elevation section of the potholes feeding into the Leck Fell Master cave.

Looking at Gavel Pot sump - is this survey correct? I assumed that the static water level in Gavel Pot sump would match that of the sump at the bottom of Lost Johns (and pippikin / witches II for that matter) +/- a few inches for hydraulic head.

The survey shows Gavel Pot sump perched much higher? 100ft or so.

Anyway, it would be a fantastic project for someone to recreate a modern version of this elevation survey including all the discoveries since. Does such a thing exist?
 
Steve, the updated version of this elevation is Figure 2 on page 309 of Tony Waltham's Cave and Karst of the Yorkshire Dales Vol II. It appears the original version you posted is indeed incorrect as you suggest, although I can't quite work out where the error is!
 
I remember at the time of publication the elevation of Gavel Pot created a bit of a hullabaloo! A couple of well-known Dales cavers disputed it at the time.
 
The 1970 version was updated with the errors removed in 1983 (see BCRA Cave Science Volume 10 number 4 which included an explanation of the revision and a fold out survey). Lancliffe is right - the most up to date version is in Cave and Karst of the Yorkshire Dales Vol II. I produced the 1983 update paper survey with updates supplied by Tony Waltham. He identified a number of errors from the 1970 work which had to be corrected to remove the obvious (and wrong) perched sump in Gavel, etc. I believe the main problem related to an error on Ordnance Survey levels on this part of Leck Fell and was corrected with some new new surface surveying to get the correct altitude of the main entrances. Once the entrances were 'lowered' to their correct altitudes the sumps lined up with the elevation of the master cave. I once thought it would be great to update the paper survey with the new stuff but time marches on and we have entered the digital world - in any case a new paper survey would be huge! I still have the original master copy of the 1983 survey which will end up in the BCRA library.
 
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