Freesteel

Forest of Dean caving

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 9:26 am Written by: Julian

Once again, too much work happening, and all my blogging time is taken up with active activities. Last weekend I was hauled off caving to the Forest of Dean whether I liked it or not.

We picked up two cavers in Manchester and headed down, using their crap-nav stuck to the windscreen. The novelty wore off after much time hurtling down unnecessary single track lanes nowhere near our destination, only to turn back out onto a trunk road. All the campsites had huge barriers and gates, except one which we found at 1am on Miss Grace’s Lane, which was excellent. There was even another caving club staying there.

Saturday was a trip down Slaughter Stream Cave. I have added the photo to that Wikipedia page, and then got incensed to discover that those Yank cavers had deleted the coordinate field from the Infobox Cave template.

On Sunday I had an unusually pleasant morning in Chepstow foraging for breakfast owing to the fact that we were booked into Otter Hole which has a tidal sump part way through. This wasn’t scheduled to drain till 1:40pm, so I couldn’t be rushed to get going, get going, get underground.

The cave was all squalor and sharp rocks. I found it exceptionally hard going. We participated in a session of spray cleaning some of the stalagmites in the Hall of Thirty. And then spray-cleaned ourselves with a secret hosepipe in the woods where someone had dammed a stream to create a head of water. Good thinking.

Here’s a 5 minute video to of the squalor.