Come and meet the love of my life. I don’t talk about caving much here (apart from our 2004 trip to Ireland the other week) because I don’t do much of it these days but it absolutely captured my heart back in my student days and I wish I could do more of it.
Well, I could. In 2019 I did a half-day Goatchurch adventure and Berkeley Square Barbarian recently retweeted their wild caving adventure in Cheddar Gorge from last year which I read avidly. Once the pandemic is over, I could be there in an hour and a half. But it’s not quite the same as venturing into the bowels of the Earth with your peers and as much time and freedom as you like – within the limits of the ETO (estimated time out) you wrote on the call-out board back at the hut, anyway.
I started caving in late 2002. My school started the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award when I was in sixth form and our leader/my physics teacher suggested archery or caving for our Physical section as she knew people who would take us. I opted not for archery (I know!!) and figured caving would be… well, an experience. We did three trips for DofE to cover the three months and then I left school and went off to uni. Oh, look who I met at the freshers’ fair. I don’t think I went looking for the caving club exactly but I ran into them, they bribed me with a t-shirt in exchange for signing up there and then and history was made.
So what do I see in it?
If you enjoy hard physical adventuring you might enjoy caving. You get all the best of hiking (admittedly in wellies) and all the best of climbing (except not always with the safety devices you might use when actually climbing) and all the best of just getting muddy and dirty like you might have done when you were a child. I still have the upper arm muscles I developed through four years of hauling myself around underground. Like climbing, you’re not really supposed to do everything with your upper body strength but on the other hand, caving simply doesn’t have style points. Unless you’re doing something technical, like rigging or SRT, or anything involving ropes, there’s no correct way of doing anything and the way that works for you is the correct way. As the shortest regular in my caving club by nearly a foot, my correct way was often very different from everyone else’s correct way.
If you enjoy a mental puzzle you might enjoy caving. If you’re a cryptic crossword fan or a sudoku fan, the challenge of navigating a 3D multi-level space using a 2D map might be for you. I know the outdoors is 3D as well and most of us manage fine with flat maps but caves are more 3D. When you’re climbing a mountain, the path will never spiral away underneath you and overlap with the path you’re on. As the lowest ranked member of my club, I rarely got to be in charge of the navigation but a couple of us did once spend an entire weekend trying to learn OFD Top by heart and I became the expert on that one for a while.
If you enjoy technical skills you might enjoy caving. Learning SRT will be your heart’s delight, learning the correct knots to rig ropes and ladders, self-rescue techniques, there’ll be enough technical stuff to keep you busy for years. And then there’s the established ultimate caving book (that’s a non-Amazon affiliate link by the way) which is so technical that there’s no point in even looking at it until you’ve already had some experience. There’s a chapter on shock loads and fall factors, which is interesting but only really relevant if you’re putting maximum stress on a rope, like dangling a double-decker bus on it. Do you want to know the shear strength of an M8 screw for bolting in anchors? That’s in there. The tiniest and most bewildering details are expanded on in this book and that’s why isn’t much use for absolute beginners. Go for this one instead (another non-Amazon affiliate link!).
If you enjoy exploring places no one has seen before you might enjoy caving. There’s a phrase you’ll hear all the time: “more people have been to the moon”. In the UK, that’s not often true. Most of the time you’ll be visiting the same caves as everyone else. Goatchurch & Sidcot for beginners, move up to Swildon’s and GB and then graduate to Eastwater if you’re in the Mendips. OFD for everyone, Daren Cilau for those who enjoy a really long crawl and Pwll Dwfn and Pant Mawr for learning SRT & ladders if you’re in South Wales. I haven’t been to Yorkshire or Wales enough to know what caves everyone does there. But once you’ve got some serious caving skills, you can start exploring, go off on expeditions to find and map holes in the ground that no one has ever seen before and then you really are into “more people have been to the moon” territory. There are so few places on Earth that haven’t been explored by now and the interior of the planet is one.
If you enjoy cold water swimming you might enjoy caving. I’m not going to get into cave diving because it’s so far beyond my abilities and comprehension that there’s no point but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to encounter water. Caves – the UK’s limestone variety, anyway – are made of water. Even dry caves can be muddy and wet caves can range from a stream to a river, from puddles to lakes. You’ll get to splash, you’ll get to swim, you’ll get to buy a wetsuit (mine was a shorty one from Asda for about £25!). I think it’s in Swildon’s where the path takes you down through two big pots – they’re shaped like hot tubs and about the same size but the water is freezing and muddy. You can climb around the edges but to fall or jump in is to get yourself christened a son or daughter of Mendip. Yeah, I’m a daughter of Mendip, I’ve fallen in. Then there are sumps – flooded passages. Some of them are free-diveable and the one you’ll meet on one of your earliest trips is only about a foot long, so you hold your breath and slither through. Anything longer than about two feet and you’ll need diving equipment.
If you enjoy cleaning you might enjoy caving. We used to go off for the weekend and Sunday afternoon was always devoted to cleaning the kit. It’s not just for the pride of having clean stuff. Cave mud contains tiny crystals which can tear equipment open from the inside. You don’t want your rope disintegrating for lack of washing while you’re dangling above an abyss on it. You don’t want your expensive oversuit ripping open at all (I have a post on how to repair them, by the way). So when you’ve finished, you take off your oversuit and stand outside in your undersuit & wellies and you scrub the suits with a hose and a broom. Then you scrub the ropes with a rope washer, which is sometimes as simple as a narrow pipe lined with astroturf and a hose running over the top, even if you haven’t used them. They’ll probably still be wet & muddy from being carted into the cave and back. I used to spend Monday morning (after I’d got up at 8am to unpack the kit from the minibus into the sports centre attic) scrubbing my small personal kit – kneepads, neoprene socks, belt etc – in the sink in my student house. What’s a bit of mud when someone’s smoked a full pack in the sink over the weekend?
If you enjoy drinking beer you might enjoy caving. Every evening you go off to the pub and caving pubs tend to be the old-fashioned kind where you’re supposed to be slightly grubby and drink dark beer. If you have cause to get rescued, it’s the done thing to buy the rescue team a keg of beer. Caving is not a wine or spirits sport (unless you really want to annoy Roger at the Hunters – current cavers, is he still there? What’s his policy on phones these days?).
If you enjoy spending money on shiny toys you might enjoy caving. There are two extremes in caving. You either use kit that’s so worn and old you can’t tell what colour it used to be and it’s a hazard to life, or you use kit that’s so shiny it’s never seen an actual cave. You can start from fluffy multicoloured undersuits or custom-made harlequin oversuits, work your way up through SRT kits and all the extras you don’t really need like foot jammers and emergency equipment you’ll only use if you’re rescue qualified, right the way up to camera equipment and lighting and then, for the sake of more shiny kit, you could take up cave diving.
If you enjoy drinking games you might enjoy caving. There’s exciting stuff like Fizzbuzz and Drain the Bucket and Fluffy Bunnies (I can’t even be in the same room as Fluffy Bunnies, let alone play it and even thinking about it is making me want to gag) but most caving drinking games involve caving stuff set to copious amounts of beer. There’s body traversing – play with a partner, one standing, one traversing, and you have to make a full circuit over head and through legs, down either front or back and back up the other. There’s endless squeezing. You saw the squeezebox in the Ireland post but cavers will squeeze through anything. A gate, a chair, a clothes hanger, a bike lock, the stairs – if there’s a gap less than 30cm thick, a drunk caver will try to shove their way through it.
If you enjoy repeating double entrendres you might enjoy caving. Every year I watch my old uni club design their new hoodies via the Facebook group (which I’m still a member of!) and every year I see “cavers do it in rubber suits”, “any hole’s a goal” and “cavers like it deep and dirty” as if they’re the first person to think of it. Caving does lend itself to that sort of thing.
If you enjoy peace in your surroundings you might enjoy caving. The times I remember most fondly are the times when everyone else is off doing something else and I’m just lying in the dark, on a smooth-ish damp rock and probably singing madrigals into the echo. It’s not claustrophobic or frightening, it’s just a few minutes of absolute peace before you get too cold and have to start moving again.