Well now that's been cleared up I can post. This trip was to finish off the bolt-climb me and Al started two years ago in the Bell Chamber, beneath the cartgate choke. This section has always intrigued me as it's largely natural, and may be the 'Deep Shaft' managed by Robert Hallom, the mine owner in the 1630s. Twelve years ago, when I first visited, there was a very dodgy handline climb up to a ledge on a scrin, and then a further dangerous scramble up to a high, wide ledge that's passed as you abseil in - but it's impossible to reach from the rope. There's a large bank of layered sediment against one wall, and Odin Old Vein crashes through one side of the chamber - where the final down pitches are, and is presumably how the miners discovered the chamber originally, as the access shaft from Widowers Vein is just too perfectly-judged to have been an accident - they knew what they were driving down to.
From the ledge, a complex of small and muddy pipe-workings can be entered - likely to be very old as there are no shotholes in there - though they may not have needed gunpowder as the mineral is quite soft. Dunno. Anyway, when I visited a few years ago, whilst we were preparing to do the DCA rebolting, I noticed this handline had gone, and so decided to reinstate it. The bolt climb wasn't high, but bloody awkward as it's overhanging, and there's a drop into another blind passage below, so falling would be nasty - anyway, I ran out of bolts as I got to the first ledge, so was unable to go any further on that trip. And then Covid happened. So it's been on hold ever since, and we finally got to go back on Saturday, accompanied by Louse Ranken, who'd never been to Odin before.
The climb up to the first ledge was a doddle this time, and I was able to put some higher bolts in and rig a SRT route and backups up to the (safe) large ledge. At this point we should have taken our harnesses off! The pipe workings are very muddy, being half-full of sediment - again, this means they communicated with the surface at some point during the glacial melt cataclysm, and via a natural passage - somewhere. The pipe workings are a veritable rabbit-warren of interconnected passages and small chambers, very much like Clatterway, with pickwork everywhere - they must have got some decent yields from here, and again, the plethora of tiny pickwork suggests they were taking out large lumps. There's some beautiful snow-white flowstone, which is almost fluorescent, and it has the faintest turqouise tinge - it's really special, but it just runs over the mud, so must be recent - and we were really careful to not get mud on it.
We couldn't find any further way on, but none of this is on the survey, so I'll leave it rigged for a while so it can be done with a Disto. I can't imagine many will be tempted, as it is filthy, but sediment means natural, so it has to be worth further examination. The two phreatic chambers that intersect the cartgate just west of here are also of great significance. Similarly, there are small solution features all over the cartgate roof as you come out of the crosscut - I suspect some of the cartgate chamber is an enlarged natural vein cavity. If anyone does want to visit, please do take off your harness before entering the pipe, as it will become covered in the worst clag imaginable, and we all had great difficulty climbing all the pitches out - plus it'll trash the rope I left in, and it's Gleistein. There's also a very committing hole/crawl on the main ledge itself that was just too tight for me to attempt, but it can be seen to continue.
There is more to tell on elsewhere in there, but lets deal with this one first - anyone got any ideas on the natural? And anyone know who originally rigged the handline up there? And who took it down?
