Freesteel Blog » Mapping the Large Mud Mine

Mapping the Large Mud Mine

Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 1:48 am Written by:

A couple of months ago I videoed Becka and friends in Large Pot, Leck Fell, doing old fashioned tape, compass, clino surveying. Through a series of tortuous routes, this cave is connected to Ireby Fell Cavern, so there’s pressure from the Misty Mountain Mud Miners to designate this whole thing as the Large-Ireby System, because false adjectives are fun.

I’m quite pleased with this video.

The fact is, Large is not large, and the second pitch is very tight to squeeze down. I decided to take off my yellow plastic oversuit and stuff it through ahead of me, which gave Becka a split-second fright as it looked and sounded like a body falling down the shaft. Then I slithered through less encumbered.

Here’s the zoomed out version of the cave survey so far.

The Red Herring series and the main drag had already been surveyed in weeks before. We went down the main route and did some of Pumpkin Passage on the side, avoiding Colossus Pitch.

We did the the survey of Pumpkin Passage, then finished off with most of Tinkle Inlet.

The delicate little speleotherms go tinkle as you go past. The passage appeared to go down to a sump or a very low duck at the end, and it was far too miserable to carry on. The start of the video is Becka crawling along that first section before the 90 degree left hand bend.

The huge chamber at the bottom of Large Pot has now been surveyed, but I don’t have the data.

While uploading the vid onto the youtubes, I spotted that a couple of people had subscribed to the goatchurch channel.

Hoo boy.

I got to say, as art, it absolutely beats a lot of the video installations I’ve seen down at the Tate. Perhaps he could get paid.

Without much effort you can find more videos of people squirming in mud that have received tens of thousands of views than I make mouse clicks in an average week. So they must have something right.

1 Comment

  • 1. On-line directory tree we&hellip replies at 14th September 2012, 4:05 pm :

    […] If you want to know why the page is muddy, a video of the conditions in which the data was gathered is here. […]

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