Team: Petie Barry, Shane Diffley
Time: 7.5 hours.
Aim: Survey to the end of Purken Warbeck Passage
Round 3 of my effort to survey John Thomas, this time heading up the rope climb into Purken Warbeck with Shane. We reached the rope pretty quickly after entering, and kitted up to head up the rope. There is a rope in place here, rather oddly rigged, and apparently has been there for some time as the steel crab on top has a good bit of rust on it, but all appears to be secure otherwise. I’m not sure who put this rope in and left it in - possibly Gaelan?
Anyhow, at the top, right at the lip of the pitch, is a canal stretching off into the distance. Here we dekitted, and got out the survey gear to head off down this passage. After a brief thigh-deep section the canal is left behind and a muddy crawl in a tube continues, running to a hole in the floor after about 25m. This is mentioned in the book as being a tantalising pitch needing widening, and I could see the remnants of Gaelan’s capping efforts here in the shape of not one, but two abandoned capping rods wedged and rusted in the wall. The pitch itself looks almost passable, however futher down, maybe 6m down, it looks very tight, and with no room for capping. Interesting, but I wouldn’t be racing back to this lead.
Beyond the muddy crawling tube continues, until you reach a gravelly thrutch up and a small pile of boulders, marking the start of Purken Warbeck proper. At this point there’s a lot of sandstone boulders and animal bones visible - presumably the narrow rift in the roof here runs to the surface. The next feature is a very low and squeezy bedding plane crawl of about 3m, which soon reaches larger proportions beyond in a standing-height chamber, Square One. A wriggle down through boulders at the far end, then an awkward wet squeeze brings you once again to larger territory, this time a booming rift passage with calcite streaming down the walls and onto the floor. A beautiful place. This was basically the routine - tall well decorated passages on cross-rifts, linked by sections of low awkward crawls. After a time we reached a particularly well-decorated section, where trampling over the flowstone floor was impossible to avoid. But there has been multiple parties in here in the past, which left no mark on the flowstone, so presumably wet weather drippiness cleans off these gours and flowstones. The highlight here was a pom-pom type formation, where a ball of calcite has formed on the end of a stal that has formed at the water level of a gour pool.
It was here where we encountered the wet and dry squeezes. We ended up attempting the wet squeeze first, where you slide headlong into a pool of water on your side and wriggle forward towards a large chamber ahead. Sadly the only way into this chamber was via a left-hand bend that was too acute for me to pass, so I was forced backwards, and emerged thoroughly soaked. The dry squeeze proved much easier, and we entered the chamber beyond. Here there was a few clusters of helectites, and more flowstone on everything. The way on continued into the mud canals, which were a fairly unwelcome bit of passage after four hours of slow, cold surveying. This started off as a low stoop under the roof with about half a metre of water. Beyond was a series of low wet grovels in thigh-deep water, with liquid mud churning beneath your feet, and a strong draft barreling through. With the passage floored in water, surveying was tricky, but we got a centreline through it by not sketching or shooting splays and quickly exited the water into drier territory. This was a low squeezy ‘chamber’, Back to Square One. Here we shot a final few legs into the foot of a fairly terminal boulder choke, which is obviously quite close to the surface, with large limestone blocks mixed with sandstone boulders. The draft is sucked into this choke at a fine clip, and we packed up and left quickly to avoid getting too chilled.
The return was fairly quick, and we reached the surface after about an hour and 15 mins of caving. Purken Warbeck is a fairly fantastic bit of cave - sporting, varied, and very different in character to the rest of the Sruth Coppa Caves, being (mostly) dry, extremely well decorated, and pristine. It obviously gets very few visitors into the far end of the passage - Artur Kozlowski is the only person I know to have reached the end in recent times. It’s just as well as this section of passage is quite delicate, and wouldn’t handle traffic very well. Thankfully the difficulty and faff of getting anywhere near the end should be enough to put most people off coming in.
Our day’s survey work totalled 230m, bringing the JT total to 655m of surveyed passage. Allowing for the length of the sump then the total is closer to 800m. The total for the Sruth Coppa caves now stands at 1900m of surveyed passage. Leads wise, the narrow pitch is probably the best place to try here, but it looks like a lot of work. The choke at the end is probably right under Cradle Hole, when I properly survey Upper and Lower Cradle and plot everything I'll know better where it's located, but I don't think there's much prospect (or need) to dig here.
Petie