Jocks Trap and Templebawn, 17 October 2021

Team: Petie Barry, Shane Diffley

Time: 4 hours

Aim: Widen entrance of Jocks Trap, assess digging potential, survey.

A pleasant Sunday trip on a fairly balmy day. Hiked over from the Hoo with Shane, popping into Pollreagh along the way for a look. Never been into this huge 80m diameter doline before, at the bottom there’s a swampy hole, and a fine limestone cliff, with an enticing entrance at the base. But this fizzles out into a narrow rift after 3m.

One we went, down into the Monastir Gorge, passing Templebawn, which we couldn’t resist entering for a look. Shane, never there before, was very impressed. On exiting the cave we quickly found Jock’s Trap, which had evaded me on two previous attempts to look for it. However, during the summer exped Tony Furnells and Becka Lawson had located it, and filmed the entrance, so I knew where to look this time.

The narrow, and well hidden entrance is a small cleft behind a large boulder, entering a cross-rift almost immediately. The entrance is exceptionally narrow - it’s barely wide enough for a helmet to scrape through, and the space to turn into the cross-rift is very limited indeed. It feels implausible that Tony and Jock were able to get around the bend and go down the climb beyond, but this they did do, somehow.

Unfortunately I, and many others, are less small and flexible, so the capping gear was whipped out to make the cave passable to normal-sized people. We started by taking off the left hand side with a series of caps and then much chiselling of the fractured rock. Once this was out of the way it was possible to drill and cap the two boulders on the right, which were very compliant in shattering away to nothing.

With the entrance squeeze less of a squeeze, I wrigged through and then slid down the narrow climb just beyond. This was 6m deep, and widened out at the bottom. Straight on a short drop reached a narrow section, with 4/5m of rift visible beyond. This drafted, but looked like a lot of capping would be involved. Back under the entrance climb a slide down under the roof entered a low rocky crawl heading in the opposite direction of the rift. While trying to position myself to look down this a large rock came out of the roof and landed on my legs. I rolled this off myself, and then another came down so I decided to retreat, not fancying the though of the entire roof of the crawl pinning my legs to the floor. Shane lowered down the survey gear on a rope and I surveyed out. Once on the surface, Shane headed in for a look. Just as he was about to go down the climb I discovered that Sexytopo had crashed and deleted the survey, so Shane was handed the DistoX to resurvey the cave. Shane returned 15 minutes later, the survey data gotten this time, and saved.

Once we were packed up, we surveyed down through the trees and into Templebawn, with a whistlestop survey conducted. This shows Jocks’ Trap and the main Templebawn rift to be in line, and more or less level. Jocks trap is about 11m deep, and 18m long.

Petie