Over the weekend, you may have caught this story, which made headline news across the UK: Man rescued from cave after two days, the story of an injured caver in South Wales who had a somewhat… difficult rescue. In fact, it took 250-odd people more than 53 hours to get him out. If you’re not a caver and you’re not familiar with the cave in question, that might sound horrendous and I want to talk about it.
If you don’t know, and I don’t talk about it quite so much these days (hi, anyone reading this blog who was subjected to my emails between 2003 and 2007!), I was a very keen caver in my student days and my logbook says I’ve been in the cave in question 18 times. The moment I heard “really long rescue” and “Brecon Beacons” I knew exactly what had happened because something very similar happened in my day, a spinal injury in a similar location which also required taking the long way out, except it only took about 28 hours and 150 people instead of 54 hours and 250 people, but on the other hand, it did involve the air ambulance.
So I want to cover a few things. Mostly the cave. I have a vague idea of what the rescue itself actually involved but the extent of my previous experience with cave rescue is lending one of the rescuers something to tie her hair back with while staying firmly at the hut and out of everyone’s way so I’ll be sticking mostly to what I know first-hand.
One thing I do know about cave rescue, however, is that they’re volunteers – people who are sufficiently into caving to choose to have specialist training and be willing to drop everything to go and haul someone out from underground, but they are just ordinary cavers. A lot of them did an extraordinary thing this weekend. And of course, there will also have been plenty of people running around above ground, the people coordinating everything, the people preparing stuff, the people charging batteries, the people running to Ystradgynlais for bacon and keeping everyone fuelled and so on. There will have been almost as many people keeping things running upstairs as there were underground.
So, the cave. The cave is named Ogof Ffynnon Ddu, the Cave of the Black Spring. If you’re interested, my understanding of Welsh pronunciation is that it’s “ogg-ov funnon thee”. It’s known as simply OFD. I was always told it’s the deepest cave in Britain, by virtue of the fact that the upper reaches are more or less at the top of Carreg Cadno (summit: 538m) and its lower parts are down underneath the valley, just down the road from Craig-y-Nos Country Park. It’s hard to translate that into a lower and upper altitude owing to the fact that it’s a cave but broadly, from bottom to top it’s like scaling a small mountain except in the dark and with a lot more obstacles.
It’s in an area that cavers call “South Wales” despite someone on Twitter getting very upset that “South Wales” isn’t a thing. It is to cavers. UK caves are found in Mendips, South Wales, the Peak District and Yorkshire. It’s on my Brecon Beacons OS map and it’s specifically in the Black Mountains, which is the easternmost chunk of the National Park. Even more specifically, OFD is in the upper Swansea Valley. The nearest town of any size is Abercraf, the nearest village is Pen-y-Cae and the settlement itself, which consists of a quarry, an abandoned station and a caving club, is Penwyllt. If you ever watched the Torchwood episode Countrycide, with the cannibals in the grey stone village, that was all filmed at the South Wales Caving Club, although I seem to remember they covered the logo on the front of the building with a flag and Cwm Dwr quarry is the one that Jack stands on the edge of, with his coat flapping in the breeze.
OFD is a huge system, so huge that cavers tend to treat it as three separate caves. Down the bottom is OFD 1, or Bottom. This part is liable to flash flooding so you have to go in there with someone who’s trained to know what to do in the event of a sudden flood and obviously you only go in during good weather. Cwm Dwr is in the quarry next to the caving club and is the tightest, crawliest part of the system, its entrance being an egg-shaped vertical concrete tube that’s ideal for someone of around my height but quite awkward for anyone over six feet due to lack of space for thigh bones. ODF II, or Top, is halfway up the mountain and there’s a lot of big stomping passageway, plenty of interesting crawly stuff and enough twists and turns to occupy a caving club for years. Nigel and I spent a couple of weekends exploring up there, becoming the club authorities on it back in 2005. There’s also OFD III but it doesn’t have its own entrance and is only accessible via a long exploration of OFD II. I’ve never been up there.
All three entrances are gated and you need a permit from the caving club next door to get the key. It’s not the sort of cave any passing walker can wander into and get into difficulties. It’s not even the sort of cave any old beginner can get into. Admittedly, permits are granted pretty freely to any caving club that asks for one – or they were in my day – and although it is of course a formidable cave, there’s plenty in there to keep a group of beginners busy and happy for a few weekends, under the eye of a more experienced member of the group.
The entrances are tiny and they give no hint as to the scale of the underground behemoth. How big? Well, the cave survey – the map – spans an entire wall at the SWCC, which is ten ex-miners’ terraced cottages with internal doors knocked between them. So this map occupies most of the depth of the cottage, probably getting on for fifteen or twenty feet long, and is probably four or five feet tall.
The above picture is taken from the old SWCC website here, and you can see that the photo cuts off before the survey does. That’s not an enlargement for display purposes. That’s how much room it takes to show the whole thing. You can buy your own copy which is much smaller but last time I was there, it still occupied about six sheets of A2 which isn’t very practical to take underground with you. One of the boys bought one once and I painstakingly photocopied the upper sections so I could put it in my scrapbook. It’s still blu-tacked to my door, all these years later, so let’s take a look:
This is a tiny section of OFD 2. The passages at the left and bottom head vaguely in the direction of Cwm Dwr and the passages at the right and top head vaguely towards OFD 3. Fifteen years ago, I was reasonably familiar with about half of this bit of the map. Where do you start? Yeah, this is a 3D maze drawn in two dimensions. We try to think of the caves in layers – these bits are one level, these bits are the next level down and so on but caves just aren’t that simple. The day wrist-mounted holograms are invented will be a great day for cavers, other than that the projector will need to be very waterproof and very tough.
I repeat, where do you start? You go in at the top entrance, the one officially named Ogof y Nos Hir which no one ever actually says, ignore the Big Chamber Near the Entrance and make your way to Salubrious Passage via a corkscrew-shaped boulder choke and an awkward climb down near-vertical but sinuous walls that I can no longer find on the map. I think. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been in this case.
This tiny little thing appears at the bottom of the OFD virtual tour, to give you an idea of whereabouts in the system you are. That highly detailed survey on my door covers roughly the area in the tiny white box. That’s how big this cave is and that’s how complex it is. Have I given you an idea of the scale of this yet? Good! By the way, I recommend you go and spend a while playing with that virtual tour because that will give you a better idea of what it looks like inside than anything I could tell you. It was created in 2002, so the website is a bit clonky but for its age, it’s an incredible thing, especially as it predates the great Make Everything Virtual of 2020.
Ok, so let’s refer back to that tiny little map again.
Our injured caver met his accident somewhere quite close to the green E in the Cwm Dwr section, probably in that dog-leg single wiggle before it reaches the great mass of green tangly wiggle. If the entrance had been bigger than the aforementioned narrow vertical concrete tube and a lot of flat-out crawls, he could probably have been got out in an hour or two but it’s impossible to get a stretcher through. On the ground, it’s only a little over a kilometre to walk up to the top entrance. Underground, the bottom entrance looks like it’s closer but there’s the flood risk and I gather the connection between OFD I and Cwm Dwr is a bit tricky, so although going to the top entrance is further and more complex navigationally, it’s far easier passage for a stretcher.
Here you go, this is why Cwm Dwr is impassible with a stretcher! That bit where he descends the tube using a rope – I put my back in the narrow bit of the oval and use my feet in the footholds on the wide end and chimney down, and I’m pretty sure we never bothered with a rope (it was a long time ago, I may be wrong) but the caver in the video is evidently far too tall for that, so a slide down the rope it is!
If that entrance wasn’t as it is, the rescue would have been done in only a few hours and the national news would never have heard of it. But it is as it is and so we have to go the long way out. Someone who knows the cave better than me in the BBC coverage said that it would take three or four hours to get from Cwm Dwr to Top. My caving log says I’ve done the through trip but it was on our South Wales holiday in 2005 and for some reason, it’s the one trip I don’t have a write-up of in my scrapbook. The only thing I clearly remember about that trip is sitting outside the SWCC and discovering I had sunburn. Sunburn, on a caving trip, in Wales! I do vaguely remember wearing a wetsuit and getting too hot and looking forward to finding some water to cool off and I reckon that had to be that trip – Cwm Dwr is dry and you wouldn’t normally wear a wetsuit for Top but I guess we spent a lot of time splashing our way up the streamway and that’s why I might have been wearing one that time. Well, I’m pretty sure it would have taken us more than three or four hours.
Add in a stretcher, the difficulties in carrying and conveying, the need to keep the casualty warm and dry and the many occasions when you’re going to have to rig ropes to carry the stretcher over something awkward – which means transporting ropes, metalwork and power tools into the cave to place the anchors – and you can well imagine how a so-called three to four hour trip turned into 54. I’m trying to find a way to phrase this that doesn’t trivialise either the injuries or the rescue efforts… let’s say that the distance and the time taken don’t necessarily correlate with a major injury. I mean, they did in this case, absolutely, but any minor injury that meant someone couldn’t get back out of Cwm Dwr would have forced a departure through the top door which could well have taken that long without actually being a serious major rescue event. I had a friend who dislocated her knee in a cave. Mendip CRT helped her out in a couple of hours and she was hopping around and back in the minibus with us the next day. If that had happened in Cwm Dwr, she’d have caused a major rescue for a relatively minor reason – which is fine, I’m just trying to say that “trapped underground for 54 hours while half the country turns out to rescue them!!” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a matter of life or death.
My last point is “why would anyone do anything like this?” and I’ve been trying to answer that for nearly twenty years. I don’t know. Love is irrational and impossible to explain. I used to love caving. I still do but getting to do it these days is pretty impractical and I’m neither the same shape as I was back then nor as fit as I was back then, so I’d struggle a lot more than I used to. I never liked the bit where you have to drop and just trust that the ground really was only an inch or two below your feet and I think these days there’s a lot I’d just be too scared to even try. But back then, I enjoyed the climbing and splashing and getting muddy, I enjoyed the dark, I enjoyed the novelty, I enjoyed the silence. One of my fondest memories is of lying on my back in a cold damp rock tube with the ceiling six inches above my nose while our group leader explored out of earshot, listening to a fresher on his first trip, wearing jeans, produce a harmonica and make music into the darkness. I’ve also sung madrigals to myself on many occasions when there’s no one near enough to hear. It echoes delightfully.
And a second prong to the “why would anyone do anything like this?”. Regardless of above-grounders’ vision of caving as an extreme sport, the majority of cavers of my acquaintance are actually the practical, competent, careful type, the kind who think long and hard before rushing in. Caving injuries beyond ordinary bruises and dents aren’t that common, so don’t go thinking that caving is perilous based on two big rescues making the news within three and a half years. And don’t go thinking that anyone who does such a dangerous sport deserves all they get: the majority of caving injuries are caused by stupid bad luck, not by human error or recklessness. Besides, as they’ve demonstrated amply this week, cavers look after their own.
Have I covered everything? The scale of the cave and thus the scale of the rescue? Is there anything else I can tell you about caving or about this cave? Leave me a comment and I’ll see if I can answer it.