Post date: Apr 23, 2019 8:40:04 PM

Time: 3.5 hours

Team: Petie Barry, Dáire O’Carroll

Old Barr Sink is a fairly large depression about 200m to the north of Noon’s Hole. It takes a small seasonal stream and is presumed to feed into the FA Series in Noon’s about 80m below. The cave was pushed by Derbyshire cavers in 1997, who broke into a small boulder chamber with the way on choking off in boulders. I checked this place out during the 2014 Student Caving Forum, and found it to be choked at the surface. Digging out flood debris, I opened up a pincer squeeze between boulders which dropped down into a 1.5m high rift with one good wall and one lousy wall of broken cherty boulders. There appeared to be a way on down through the boulders at the lowest point so I put it in the memory bank as an interesting spot to dig. The cave is formed in a fairly brittle cherty limestone, so there’s a lot of nasty loose stuff in there, but hopefully better limestone lies underneath this stuff, so theres a chance of finding an 80m deep shaft system here.

Flashforward to 2019. With a capping kit freshly assembled I was keen to try out my new toy. Since a gang was going to Noon’s I recruited UCD fresher Dáire and we hitched a ride up the road. We met the farmer, and having got permission to enter the cave we reached the sink, just 30m from his sheds. The boulder squeeze I’d previously been through had filled up with flood debris. We cleared this out and just before dropping through I tested the boulders with the crowbar. With a minimum of encouragement they all collapsed, leaving a 1m square hole and a lot more work to do at the bottom. Aside from being safer the main advantage of this collapse was that we could now drag the boulders to the surface and keep the working area nice and open. We set about drilling and capping the boulders for the next three hours and quickly built a large spoil heap. Eventually a black space opened up at the bottom of the rift and we could wriggle forward into a 5m long boulder chamber. At the end it turned left and choked in boulders. A bit of clearing out of flood debris in the floor caused the draft to pick up here, so it’s still promising, but more digging will be needed.

Looking back at the original 1997 account, it seems as if the boulder chamber we entered was the same that the Derbyshire cavers found, so we just dug through a collapse that happened since they were in the cave. The cave is about 12m long and 5m deep.

Petie