Giants Hole

Gritstone

Member
So I have a strong love of Giants Hole, I may even glow slightly as a result of my visits. Having been in again over the weekend with an absolute caving legend I started kicking myself for not probing him further on how they got in prior to the blasted passage. I've tryed to find an old survey but can't. My question is can the original route still be done and if so where did it go and is there a survey maybe that shows it.... I would be really interested in trying it without the bypass if it's still possible.
 

Pete K

Well-known member
The current route to the broken column is the result of the modifications (widening by blasting) of the original passages, so you are already doing the old route. I guess for authenticity, you should crawl on your belly all the way from the entrance with someone carrying a rock just above your head! I'm too young to know how it really used to be though!
 

Gritstone

Member
Thanks for that, the Yorkshire stuff is really interesting. I'll have a flick through the rest when I'm back at work and can use the big screen, it takes a while to view things on a phone.
 

Groundhog

Member
Sadly I am old enough to remember Giants before the entrance series was blasted out. The current route does follow the original. Just that all the tight bits have gone. Not far from the entrance was Near Curtain, a short crawl down at stream level. The point where you now step up and leave the stream was Pillar Crawl, a roof tube about 10m long. It ended just where the broken stal (The Pillar) is. At the end of the descending passage which follows was Backwash Sump which had to be bailed. There were a series of concrete dams which have now gone.
If you look closely you can see all the blasted bits.
 

Brains

Well-known member
Groundhog said:
Sadly I am old enough to remember Giants before the entrance series was blasted out. The current route does follow the original. Just that all the tight bits have gone. Not far from the entrance was Near Curtain, a short crawl down at stream level. The point where you now step up and leave the stream was Pillar Crawl, a roof tube about 10m long. It ended just where the broken stal (The Pillar) is. At the end of the descending passage which follows was Backwash Sump which had to be bailed. There were a series of concrete dams which have now gone.
If you look closely you can see all the blasted bits.
At Backwash Pool - the horizontal passage before Basecamp Chamber, a series of water worn etched lines can be seen, these would have been the water level. Just before emerging the walls are all blasted, showing where the passage was enlarged. Much of the floor from daylight to below Garlands is composed of blasting debris, with some concrete surfacing remaining near Upper East and West passages.
 

Gritstone

Member
Thanks guys, that's really interesting stuff. I'm very keen to find out how the caves used to be in the past and also how they compare to what I'm finding down there today. Ive just finished reading the Barry King caving logs which were also full of wow moments.
 

paul

Moderator
There are some photos from that era at: http://archives.bcra.org.uk/?level=document&collection=king&document=photos-giants&item=0
 

Gritstone

Member
Wow, that's a serious amount of effort to enter a cave and with a torch like the one I had on my first bike. Now I see why they had such problems with lighting. Also amazing it looked back then its awesome now but not a patch on back then.
 

Groundhog

Member
The photo of Garlands on rope ladder took me back. The first time we got to the bottom, 1967 I think, was on rope ladders. Hard work lugging them down crab walk.
I am aware that everyone else was using electron by then but the DCC were a bit late in catching up!
 

Mrs Trellis

Well-known member
iirc in the mid-60's you'd have to come back up Crab Walk as the Maginn's rift route wasn't known.

Also when did Messrs Watson & Revell commence blasting operations?
 

Jenny P

Active member
The blasting was done in the winter of 1967/68 and cavers didn't know what was going on until it was well advanced.  That was the year of a really bad Foot-and-Mouth outbreak so that all caving, walking, climbing, etc. was put on hold throughout the country for nearly 6 months.  Hence no-one went near Giants, which is on farm land, and Mr. Watson, who owned Peakshill Farm, and Mr. Revell, who did the actual "mining" work, were able to get on undetected.

The idea was to turn it into a show cave but they could not get planning permission for the necessary car park so, after all the damage and expense, they had to give up the idea.

Garlands is gradually returning to its original depth as the rubble gets washed away down the Crabwalk.  We were shocked when we first got in after the winter if 67/68 to find that Garlands was only 15 ft deep, instead of its original 30ft.  It seemed that once the passage had been opened sufficiently at Pillar Crawl and the sump to allow someone to get through with tools, the rubble from the blasting was wheelbarrowed down the passage and tipped over the top of Garlands Pot.  In the summer of 1967 I can remember seeing a caver right at the top of the old fixed ladder on the 30 ft deep Garlands Pot with water pouring over his shoulder as the cave was in fair flood. 

in early 1967 Eldon P.C. had chiselled a shallow channel from the Backwash Pool downstream which allowed the static sump to drain sufficiently to leave a half-inch airspace, so the dams went out of use.  However, the remaining duck was low enough to catch out someone who tried to go through with a rope round his shoulders and jammed solid, having to be hauled back out by his feet.  There was at least 6ft of flat-out crawling in more-or-less flooded passage and, once you got into the water you raised its level so effectively cut of the air-space anyway and you had to treat it like a sump and dive through.

The cave suddenly became much more popular once you didn't have to bail the dams, and that's evidently what gave Mr. Watson the idea of turning it into a show cave.  Also remember, no cave SSSIs at that time, so no worries about damaging a cave by blasting chunks of it away as there was no legislation to stop you doing whatever damage you wanted to.

The original breakthrough which passed the sump, was in May 1954, after 4 year's determined digging led by Ken Pearce and his helpers.  It was Ken and Co. who constructed the dams, the 2nd. one further back up the passage towards Pillar Crawl being required because you couldn't get sufficient water into the 1st. dam immediately in front of the sump.  The problem was that the sump was continually being filled, albeit slowly, by the backwards flow from the pool in Backwash Chamber so you had to bail the water back into the dams faster than the sump could refill and you also had to be out of the cave and back past the dams before the sump had filled sufficiently to cut you off.

That's one reason why the 25 hour Donna Carr rescue from Giants in 1965 was so epic: because the whole sump area had to be drained and kept clear for the stretcher to get through and then Pillar Crawl and the Curtain had to be negotiated.
 

pwhole

Well-known member
Wow - thanks for that excellent description. That's the first time I've ever read any detail of what actually happened  ;)
 

bograt

Active member
Thanks for the memories Jenny, I only did it once before the F&M outbreak and I was only a young sprog back then so memory is vague. I do recall revisiting just after reopening and being extremely baffled when we arrived at the pitch head without the hassle of having to bail.
 

Jenny P

Active member
There's a lot more history here!  It must have been an epic dig!

The 2nd. person through, following Pearce, was a 17 year old called Frank Maggin, who had been digging with Pearce since the age of only 14 in 1951.  He's the Maggin of Maggin's Rift - it was named in his honour after he died only 4 months later, still aged only 17, in an accident with a canoe on a weir on the Irwell.  You can read all about it in one of the early volumes of Cave Science and there is a tribute to Maggin in the article.

The reason I know so much about the history of this period is that Frank's brother, Malcolm, contacted the British Caving Library in 2012 to ask if there was any record of his brother in our books.  Malcolm had been 9 when his brother died and their 90 year old Mother was now asking if Malcolm could find out if, as was reported when Frank died, that he'd found "the deepest cave in England".  Remember that in 1954 children left school at the age of 14 so Frank was independent and earning by that age and it was one of his schoolteachers, who happened to know Pearce, who had first aroused his intgerest in caving. 

It seems Mrs. Maggin had never seen a photo of Frank in his caving gear and Malcolm had promised to find her one if he could.  Frank had also been helping with the explorations in Peak Cavern, sherpaing diving cylinders, and we eventually found a photo of Frank in a newspaper article in the Simpson collection at BGS - he's standing at the edge of the photo illustrating the article which is about Les Salmon & Co.  So we were able to scan this and print it for Malcolm to show Mrs. Maggin.  What's more, at the time of the breakthrough in Giants, the depth down to the East Canal actually did make it the deepest cave in England.

BCL does have somewhere an old coloured survey, dated 1937, of Giants Hole before the breakthrough.  It's really weird seeing the cave ending in 2 sumps only a relatively short way in: the Main Stream Sump and the static Backwash Sump in Backwash Chamber, which is actually some 50 ft. below the level of the stream sump, with the Wet Inlets waterfall coming in from the stream sump high above.  The section from the start of Pillar Crawl to the Backwash Sump originally had no water flowing down it - the blasting of the passage changed all that - so now the waterfall down from Wet Inlets is only a fraction of its former volume because it used to take the whole flow of the stream which now flows straight down the blasted passage.
 

Mrs Trellis

Well-known member
We used to drop carbide into the pools in Pillar crawl and then light the acetylene giving a deep whoomph to frighten the novices. The use of Goon suits (ex-RAF orange survival suits with pee-tube included) made the whole trip slightly more comfortable than just ganzies. For some reason there was always a "dead" boiler suit floating in the water behind the dams. Also - if some group had failed to remove the bungs from the dams on exiting you had to let the water out , then replace the bungs, then bail the ****ing lot out again.
 

Chocolate fireguard

Active member
Jenny P said:
The section from the start of Pillar Crawl to the Backwash Sump originally had no water flowing down it - the blasting of the passage changed all that - so now the waterfall down from Wet Inlets is only a fraction of its former volume because it used to take the whole flow of the stream which now flows straight down the blasted passage.
I have read that several times and, apart from the first 19 words, I don't understand it.
It seems to say that the entrance water now flows down the route cavers take after stepping up to the left where Pillar Crawl used to be. What am I misunderstanding?

 

Graigwen

Active member
Mrs Trellis said:
We used to drop carbide into the pools in Pillar crawl and then light the acetylene giving a deep whoomph to frighten the novices. The use of Goon suits (ex-RAF orange survival suits with pee-tube included) made the whole trip slightly more comfortable than just ganzies.

Yes, I remember your obsession with Goon suits. Also the time in 1967 when you decided Giants and Carlswark were flooded so took us down P8 in interestingly wet conditions. We had three workings lights between eleven of us when we resurfaced.

I recall carbide being introduced into various drains at Priddy as well.


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