Stuart France
Active member
As to scientific study - there has been next to nothing going on. A study into bugs in the percolation water yielded nothing in the cave except the usual bugs commonly found in streams, ponds etc. The geological study is now a matter of historical record unless someone wants to look again in a few million years time. But there are caver counters by way of footfall research for all the entrances known about by cavers at large.
So we know, well I know anyway, how many through trips there are for every entrance to entrance permutation, how much Drws Cefn and Nunnery are used relative to the first entrance, and so on. I know which days of the week and hours of day are favoured for each entrance, and so on. I can tell you there isn't any conservation problem here concerning any of the entrances. Footfall at all Draenen entrances is low to all other large caves nearby like Agen Allwedd, Daren Cilau and Craig a Ffynnon.
The reason for concreting the Nunnery in the 1990s and the attempts to obtain permission to concrete Drws Cefn in 2015 relate to the former underground camps because these extra entrances rendered camping unnecessary. The underground camps were considered as suitable training venue for expeditions abroad by one particular club which is very well represented on the PDCMG, and of course camps are fun from a social viewpoint. I rather suspect Draenen camping inplied a very different kind of wildness to a wilderness experience.
The grade 5 surveyors will not complete their survey or publish for several perfectly understandable reasons:
- First, the main areas left to be surveyed are in the eastern sector, most easily accessed from the Nunnery, not the first entrance. The PDCMG won't sort out landowner permission for that efficient access - not that any permission is needed as this entrance is on Urban Common where s.193 of the Law of Property Act 1925 governs public access, but they want easy access to finish the survey to receive official blessing.
- Second, the PDCMG wants to own the intellectual property rights in survey data created by others, and then control publication of surveys, and the others of course don't like that idea when they did the 70 kilometres of hard graft
- Third, the surveyors feel they have been tarred by officialdom as being uncooperative etc when there are two sides to this problem. They feel they have invested a huge amount personally, have then been insulted, and are due an apology.
It is time for the PDCMG to draw a line under the past, to make apologies simply to move things on, and try to work for the widest possible caver interests in the future.
An EGM to discuss entrances was called for in late 2018. It is now 2020 and nothing has happened. OK we can't hold meetings right now for the obvious reason, but it is 18 months since the decision to have an EGM was voted through in an attempt to clear the air and find common ground. The delay and silence is undemocratic and a disgrace.
Incidentally, I take it that off-the-caving-club-cottage-wall images of the detailed Draenen survey have been sorted out now, i.e. the original subject of this thread?
