During the Fexped expedition one of the objectives I put on the list was to re-enter Revolution Pot, resurvey it and reassess it for digging potential. This neatly co-incided with Mike Butcher’s atttempt to dive in Hammer Pot. So on the day that Mike, Callum and Alex Hannan went to scout out Hammer Pot, they also had a look at Revolution Pot. They returned reporting that Revolution had been filled in. My heart sank and they showed me a photo of a fresh patch of gravel at the bottom of a drepression. My spirits rose again, as the photo didn’t match my memory of what Revolution looked like. All the same, they hadn’t located the entrance to Revolution, and reported that they’d checked all around but not seen anything that looked like the cave.
I headed out with Peter Ward a few days later to search for Revolution myself. Reaching the most obvious spot I found only a few choked dolines, and then we wandered around in increasingly large circles without locating anything Revolution Pot-esque. I returned to the first spot and figured out that this must be Revolution, and that the entrance had fallen in. I rememembered Revolution as a narrow slot at the bottom of a shakehole, about 2/3m deep, with one wall composed of clay. Now there was a rock wall along one side, and the other side was a clay slope, so I presumed that this had just given way and blocked the entrance. I suggested to Mike and Alex that it would be worth re-opening the cave, but it from reports of their later caving in Ireland, it seemed that they didn’t get around to digging here, instead having a go at a new dig nearby called Gibbets, named after their dig Gibbets Brow Shaft in Mendip.
Taking advantage of the mild weather Rob and I decided to have a go at re-opening Revolution Pot, and so parked up next to the cave at midday. Reaching the pot I was suprised to find someone had already been digging here - the entrance was covered over with corrugated steel and there was a fresh spoil heap. Pulling out the corrugated steel revealed a hole 2m deep, We weren’t sure if the Shepton Mallet boys had actually been digging here as well as at Gibbets, or if we’d stumbled across a Breffni Dig, but whatever the case, there was digging to be done.
The next hour and a half meant pulling out bucket after bucket of muck and slop, tidying up the collapsed west wall of the pot and making a nice work area at the bottom to dig horizontally under the undercut that was appearing 2m down. We even had a friendly visit from the landowner and his partner, who was fascinated at what we were up to.
Initially I remembered the passage leading off from the entrance drop as being to the north, towards the road, but the deeper we got the less likely this seemed. Rather than the obviously recent clay fallen in, we were now digging what looked like an original floor, dark with decomposed matter and well-compacted. There was a good draft coming in from a narrow crack to one side, but otherwise the way on was unclear. Rob mentioned that perhaps I’d mixed up my directions, and the way on was at the other end of the rift. So I had a go there instead, pulling out the digging spoil we’d been stacking there. Quickly I revealed a passage heading off, and a few buckets later I was able to slide forward into Revolution Pot.
Not so fast. Barely 4m in the passage it ended suddenly and definitively. This was just a dead end, though there was evidence of cavers having been here before, with stacked spoil dug out of the miserable crack at the end. There was a slight draft, though this was obviously circulating through to an adjacent shakehole. Rob came in for a look before we wriggled out and had another look at the North end, eventually coming to the conclusion that we just needed to keep digging down here, and that we’d expose the way into the cave eventually. I estimate another metre of depth should get us in.
After covering over the hole again we went for a look at Gibbets, to establish whether the Shepton lads had been digging here. It was a 5 minute walk away, and showed no sign of digging, so now we know it was Shepton digging at Revolution Pot. It’s an interesting, and perhaps promising spot. A small stream flows down into a low cliff in a shakehole and you can poke your head into a muddy hole, and look into a small chamber with the sound of water trickling on downwards. No draft, but the chamber looks enticing, and could be opened up in an evening.
We continued on over the hill to Hammer Pot, where Mike had been diving. After a bit of time searching we found it, the smaller of a pair of shakeholes at the bottom of a big closed depression. I, being the only one in caving gear, slithered in through the entrance and then down the narrow entrance climb of about 4m. Here there was a 2m drop with a squeeze at the head, then another 4m climb down to the start of a tight crawl where the stream flowed in a narrow crack below a phreatic tube. Immediatly I hit the first squeeze, which I slid through. It didn’t look too easy to progress, so I backed up, realised I couldn’t reverse, so was forced to head forward. This was pretty awkward, but I made it through to the next round, a tight left-hand bend. This looked worse than what I’d come through, and being on my own I turned here. Getting back up the squeeze was very tight but do-able and I made it back to the surface . It’s not a very easy cave, credit to the various parties who brought diving kit in here.
Petie