Post date: May 23, 2011 12:59:19 PM

Once upon a time Gaelan and Ian Wilton-Jones were trying to find Pigeon Pot and got terribly lost. They stumbled upon a group of shakeholes, one of which was taking water at a savage rate. Interesting, said Gaelan, and then continued trying to find Pigeon Pots. Some time later he showed this pot to me while we were on East Cuilcagh and told me "all that water has to go somewhere". I agreed

A few weeks later, in August 2010, we returned and, in a midge-infested epic, hauled out a huge amount of turf and gravel, lowering the dig about 2m in the space of three hours. The water sinking in the bottom would usually well up but then disappear as Gaelan drove a crowbar into the centre of the pool and then "wiggled the shit out of it". Gaelan and I suggest names for the cave in the car back to Tullamore, running through an estimated 47 options on the way, most of which were quite shite.

We finally returned this April, Gaelan persuading Al and I that festering about in a turfy hole was a good way to cap off the day's caving. The winter rain had cleared out a good bit of turf from the dig and generally tidied up the place and we continued digging down in a rift in the floor, hauling gravel and rocks from the floor and then walloping cherty rock off the walls to widen the rift. A false floor or two was broken past as we descended. Al spent most of the time complaining that the digging bucket I'd made was inefficient and poorly designed. 1m dug. We returned two days later, two of us to dig, one of us to sit on the surface and air further grievances about the quality of the digging bucket. This time we lowered the dig another meter and seemed to open up a faint draft at a crack in the bottom. Gaelan began to worry that the floor would dissappear all of a sudden and so installed a bolt and tied himself onto it. More names are suggested and argued about ad infinitum. We eventually settle on Pyro Pot, in memory of the impressive "natural" gorse fires raging on East Cuilcagh that day, and also to end tedious long brainstorming sessions of suggesting names.

Gaelan's enthusiasm for the dig brought myself, himself and Eabha back to Pryo for a refreshing late morning dig. After the rain we'd had over the weekend we were expecting the dig to be damp, but not quite as damp as the whitewater torrent flowing down into the pot on arrival. I climbed down to the bottom, trying to feel the footholds with my feet and hoping that they weren't brittle chert ledges. The digface was just about bearable for 10 seconds with the torrent down your back but I was there long enough to see that the water was dropping straight through the floor. Eabha and I were in wetsuits (for a surface dig) and played about a bit while the surface controller looked on impressed at the water that the pot was taking. There wasn't much digging we could do under the full force of the water so we contented ourselves with tidying up the edges of the pot, hauling out more turf and gravel so it wouldn't get washed in later. I managed to widen out the rift with Gaelan's chunky new lump hammer and could then dig the bottom out of the worst of the water but it was a race to get gravel in the buckets before they filled with water so we didn't make much downward progress. In contrast to previous digs here we didn't end up covered in a peaty muck but emerged spotless from the bottom of the dig. Al will be pleased to know that Gaelan's digging bucket is even less efficient than mine.

Pyro Pot is in a line of five shakeholes found near the first gate on the path to the Pigeon Pots. B.M.C. pot is the southernmost and takes a small stream. After our whitewater dig we looked into B.M.C. Pot and pulled out some bits of refuse and could see the bottom of the pot with water flowing. This, to the best of my knowledge, has not been entered, there being an old descent report from the 70's mentioning that it was full of crap and the explorers couldn't get in. We talked about doing a cave clean up at the next student forum as a means of cheap labour to force a clean route into the pot. Between the two sites there's a fair bit of water sinking, prospects are fairly reasonable, even if the digging conditions aren't always so.

Petie