Back in June 2004, my caving club went on an “expedition” to Ireland. That’s caving-speak for a holiday. I don’t write a lot of caving stuff but I used to spend half my life underground.
We chose Ireland mostly because that’s where they’d been the previous year and because there were plenty of caves. In the UK, caves are only in specific areas. We did a lot of caving in the Mendips in Somerset and in south Wales. Yorkshire and the Peak District are a bit far from Canterbury but we did make it to Yorkshire once. Twice? Once. However, there isn’t a single county in Ireland that doesn’t have a cave, although that made its caving scene a lot more fragmented. You didn’t get the huddle of clubs all within a ten minute walk of each other, you didn’t get a single book that covered an area or even one that covered the entire country, and Cave Rescue was based in Dublin.
We picked Doolin, in County Clare on the west coast and it took the best part of 24 hours to get there, including lying to the ferry company about why there were only nine people in the minibus and not the ten booked. My diary of the journey from Rosslare to Doolin, some 170 miles, consists of the words “drove across Ireland”. I’m glad I appreciated the scenery but apparently we boarded the ferry about 2am and most of us slept most of the way. We had a cottage, where eleven of us squeezed into three bedrooms (two people drove themselves and left early, hence only nine people in the minibus).
We were in Ireland 13 days, not including the travelling days, on a caving expedition. I’ve always said “on our one day off, we went to the local show cave!” but in fact, closer inspection of my diary says we only actually went caving five times and it doesn’t appear we did anything very spectacular on most of those. On day three, “we walked around the woods for about 3 hours”, failing to find either entrance of the cave we were looking for, but getting very wet and muddy in “long grass, foamy stuff which sank, lumps of rock etc”. I don’t remember that at all but I assume that was the day that Sarah taught us the “very rude” song she’d learned in the Cadets. I don’t remember the song either, unfortunately, but I do vaguely remember it being a very fun song. On day five we successfully went caving but but there was gloopy mud, narrow passages, a haulage kit and an eventual conclusion that this wasn’t the cave we’d set out to do.
I only had a couple of rolls of film so I don’t have many photos but I used a disproportionate number of pictures on Andy shaving his head and the tai chi lesson in the garden. I remember bits and pieces. I remember going to the Cliffs of Moher and I now know that I had no idea what I was looking at, although I noted in my diary that they’re “incredibly high”. I remember going surfing and not actually succeeding in going surfing – yes, this is a theme. I remember visiting the show cave, Ailwee Cave, where we experts felt the tour guide was patronising and I wrote that there were “a few vaguely interesting formations”. Well, I doubt we’d seen much in the way of interesting formations in the muddy flooded wild caves we’d made it into.
Day seven is the caving day I remember best. That’s the day of the self-rescue. The group split approximately into four freshers, all girls, all relatively inexperienced cavers, and four older students, all male, all relatively experienced, none particularly interested in helping us become more experienced. But on this day, they decided to throw us in the deep end – without giving us any help, of course. Doolin River Cave, right on our doorstep, has two entrances – Fisher Street Pot and St Catherine’s. I diagrammed this at the time to keep track of who was where when.
The girls enter St Catherine’s around 3pm, because we’re students and time is all the same underground. Two hours later, two of the boys follow and the other two go in Fisher Street. I assume the plan is to meet in the middle, wave at each other and reach the other end successfully. But it wasn’t successful. We got lost, the cave didn’t match the survey or we couldn’t read the survey properly. It was muddy, sandy, gritty, spidery and squalid, a lot of crawling, a lot of dead ends. It didn’t go well. We just weren’t ready to be dropped in a cave by ourselves. With an hour and a half left until our ETO, estimated time out, we met the two boys who’d come in after us and they escorted us out. There was no way we were going to make it to the other end. So far so good.
But the two boys who’d gone in the other end, there was no sign of them. So we were left at the entrance to the cave while the boys went off in the minibus to Fisher Street, where Paul went in to hunt for the missing ones. Rob returned with the minibus to the shivering group waiting at St Catherine’s, took us all back to the cottage where the girls were instructed to get dried and dressed. They’re out of the story now, all except me.
You see, there had been a huge screaming horrible rift between the boys and girls all week. There was crying and anger and people talking about each other – it’s what happens when students, especially the kind with a superiority complex, are all squashed in together with too much alcohol and not enough sleep. Things like hair straighteners become a big deal. However, I managed to sit somewhere between the two groups. That’s mostly because I’m non-confrontational and I’m slightly tougher than the others. I’m reluctantly considered a “core” member, because I turn up to everything, even though I don’t have the caving skills they really want from the core. So with the others safely tucked away in the cottage, I become part of the rescue.
Cave rescue wasn’t an option. It’s in Dublin, literally on the other side of the country, and besides “the most capable two of our group are late” isn’t really grounds for an emergency call-out. So Rob drove back to Fisher Street and we sat there for a while, until Paul re-emerged. He’d gone “most of the way” to St Catherine’s and found nobody. He’d even resorted to deafening himself by blowing his emergency whistle. I have an orange plastic whistle that automatically goes round my neck when I go caving, to this day. Not taking the whistle would be like not taking my light. I’ve never ever used it, and knowing the likely filth caked on it, that’s a good thing.
So they left me sitting in a tree overlooking the pot and returned to St Catherine’s. It’s chaos, honestly. This is why students get a bad name. It’s 10.30pm by now. and I’m sitting in a tree, tied to it by a sling attached to my belt, in the dark.
These days, cavers use LED headlights which last for years. Back then, I had two halogen bulbs powered not by the official NiMH battery pack but a disposable Duracell one of a kind that doesn’t even seem to exist anymore, a rectangular 4.5v lantern battery. It’s better than the FX2 I’d been using up until that trip, a battery the size & weight of a brick that you wear on your belt, with a life of three to four hours followed by sixteen hours of charging, but not by much and I’d already done a few hours of caving that day. So I couldn’t even switch on my lamp while I sat in that tree.
A year or so later I’d upgrade my lamp so that instead of a small secondary halogen bulb I had a seven LED array – revolutionary at the time, but it didn’t improve the battery life much, even when I also upgraded to a proper battery pack. I’ve occasionally taken that lamp caving in the last five years and it’s both very heavy and very dim compared to what cavers are using these days. I had a Tikka headtorch for backup and my current Tikka, which only has one LED, is a lot brighter than my main headlamp ever was.
Anyway, I digress. I sat in that tree, in the dark, singing to myself and just waiting, for nearly an hour and a half. Rob & Paul are in St Catherine’s, the other two are somewhere underground maybe, and the girls are back at the house, probably having a party. It was cold, it was dark and it was starting to get seriously scary.
It was 11.30pm by the time the two missing boys appeared at Fisher Street. Of course, now we’ve got two people in the other end of the cave and it took six phone calls to get hold of them, which is a miracle in itself. Phone signal is non-existent underground. Access to Fisher Street is via an electron ladder, a kind of roll-up rope ladder made out of wire, so there was a certain amount of derigging to be done and several bags of kit to be dragged across a field and over a wall before we could throw everything in the minibus.
Up until this point, Rob had been quite precious about the minibus. We had to change, the wet & dirty stuff had to be in bags, but after a dramatic evening where we lost several people several times, “we just piled into the minibus, stripped off back in the cottage and were allowed inside in wetsuits”. I imagine by this time, having left the cave about 7pm, my wetsuit probably isn’t dripping wet anymore. In concession to me sitting in a tree in wet caving stuff, I get the first shower.
Chaos.
We did some more caving after that. On day nine we had what sounds like quite a nice trip involving a flake, a scramble and a half slide, some “slithery moonmilky bits” and a “slightly awkward climb into the stream”. No rescues, no shouting and we even met another caving club in there. The day after that, we had another go at St Catherine’s which seems to have gone a lot better. It seems we went with Rob, maybe even as a whole group and once we found the right way, it was “just walking down the stream”. My diary from that morning says “If I ever had any enthusiasm for this, it’s draining very quickly”.
On our last day in Doolin, no one could be bothered with caving. We practised tying knots, because we’re nerds who know how to have a good time on holiday. One of the boys scrubbed the kit, which is a good sign that we’re not going to use it again and we spent the evening playing squeezebox. Let me insert some photos of this game!
Cavers love squeezing. The squeezebox was built by Paul and is, to the best of my knowledge, still used by the club sixteen years later. It’s just two planks joined by two very long bolts and two wingnuts. The idea is to put it over your head, pull it down your body and step out of it and it’s tightened by a turn or two of the wingnuts until there’s a winner. The planks aren’t actually attached so you’re guaranteed to get clonked on the head trying to get into it in the first place and post-caving bruises are far more likely to be caused by this contraption than any actual cave. I’ve also seen squeezing done with a wire coat hanger, a bike lock and of course, any chair, banister or gate that comes into view. The great advantage of the squeezebox is that if you get really stuck, you can be released by your merciful friends.
We spent a couple of days in Dublin on the way home, which was spent mostly watching films and drinking. I saw Batman Begins and maybe Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind during those days and apparently I was nervous about walking back to the hostel alone when I got tired of drunk people.
And that was it. I wish I had more photos but it was pre-having a digital camera and cave photography wasn’t even in its infancy, it was still in utero so there are no underground photos at all.
I’d like to re-do this trip, maybe with a better idea of where the caves are, with a group that actually likes more than 50% of the participants and with a better idea of sightseeing and appreciating what’s above ground in west Ireland.