Post date: Apr 1, 2011 12:31:55 PM

Aileen Connor, Stephen Macnamara, Stephen McCullagh, Alasdair Kennedy, 2 hours

Chose this sink as our Sunday trip following the 24 hour ICRO practice the day before. We called into the farmer (second house on Blacklion side of cave) and got permission from his wife in his absence, with a warning about the bull.

The bull and his herd posed no threat, all munching placidly at the other end of the adjacent field, so we made our way to the sink. Rigged a 5m handline which was unnecessary and quickly went to the bottom of the dig. Les and some UK cavers did some medium level rock breaking at the site last year, so we spent about half an hour clearing rubble and gravel.

The digsite is currently a 1.5m-diameter chamber with a Gortmaconnellesque water feature, i.e. drips from the ceiling which soak you to the skin. Uncovered two separate rifts, both narrow. The first goes down where the water goes for about 1.5 m, but there is currently nothing at the bottom to squeeze into. The second is dry, narrower and deeper (about 2.5 m), and was found after pulling out a digging bucket from a previous team whose name shall not be mentioned.

The dig has a draft and is worth pushing. Caps, drip shelter, lino & haul bucket would be valuable tools.

On surfacing, we saw that the river sinks in two places, so we set about damming the first sink in an effort to reduce the underground drip. Didn't get a chance to see if this was effective.

We checked a few other holes in the field. The last one was most promising, loacted 30m north of the sink. The hole had been purposely filled in with boulders, which we quickly removed to enter a 3-metre-long, slightly-sloping, flat-out crawl in good rock. This broke into a rift that narrowed on both sides. The rift dropped 4 metres to a mud floor where we dug in a drafting crack for about 15 minutes. At this stage, we heard a faint "hello". Turned out to be the farmer's wife, not in the dig, but on the surface. She was pretty angry because she thought we had upset the cattle and chased them to the corner of the field - but they actually hadn't moved since we went into the field in the first place...

In any case, that was the end of digging for that day. We refilled the hole with rocks and headed home. We would hope to return after a conciliatory chat with the farmer and the bull.

Stephen Mac.