Post date: Mar 27, 2017 5:41:58 PM

Team: Éabha Lankford, Richard Cole, Petie Barry.

Plan: Survey high level passages near Mistake Junction (ha!) and assorted other high level bits above Swingers Corner.

Time: 8.5 hours

The main objective of this trip was to mop up a few small bits of high-level passage on either side of Swingers Corner and then start surveying the high-level passages around Mistake Passage. As we shall see, this plan went horribly awry, but as we shall also see, this wasn’t such a bad thing.

On my last trip into Shannon two weeks before, I’d briefly explored a large chamber near Swingers Corner. I’d planned that on our way to Mistake we’d pop up and survey this, half an hour max. There was also a high-level bit above the Vegetable Patch, (The Vegetable Patch Penthouse I’ll call it here) which I knew very little about, but for some reason I understood that this was fairly small. So another half hour there then.

We reached the first high level section and got to work. I’d named this bit of passage Absalom’s Attic, for no other reason than it had a nice alliterative sound to it. You reach it by climbing up into boulders in the crook of a sharp bend in the passage about 50m upstream from Swingers Corner. This brings you to a ledge, and going 10m in a downstream direction brings you to;

a) a hole up into a big chamber, and;

b) a crawl along a ledge going off downstream.

We tacked the chamber first. On my first visit I’d speculated whether this was a new find, and looking about this time the only footprints we could find in the mud were my own. ‘Upstream’ this choked fairly definitely, but climbing up the claggy mud slopes in the middle of the chamber brought us up to a high muddy rift, also going nowhere. ‘Downstream’ the chamber ended in two treacherous mud and boulder funnels. Éabha climbed down the furthest of these and could see into a canyon-passage further down, but it was two nasty to continue down.

Back beneath the chamber we went off down the ledge. This was just above a drop of about 8-10m down to the stream. It veered back into a rocky passage, and we passed beneath the boulder funnels. Now in a roomy boulder chamber we pushed down to the far end where I could see the passage continuing down into a small hole. Unfortunately the way into this was protected by a large unstable boulder around the size of a washing machine, fridge, or similar domestic appliance. After a bit of deliberation I decided it wasn’t going to be possible to climb over this. A gentle shove and the boulder went off down a rocky slope for about 5m, loudly bludgeoning other boulders, then into the small hole which it demolished to around three times it’s original size, and finally vanishing down out of sight. It was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.

Once we stopped shaking, we climbed down the slope of crushed rock, which just looked like someone had spilled a bag of flour all over the place. The rocky passage continued up to the left, but I climbed down after the boulder, which had dropped into a shapely sand-floored canyon passage, about 4m tall and about half a meter wide. I strode off in a fit of exploration fever and followed this for about 30m till it reached a ledge overlooking the stream, but I did meet a single set of footprints coming against me. After I returned, Éabha led the way in the opposite direction, again meeting the stream on a ledge about 5/6m up. Striding across to a ledge on the far side of the streamway we met a rope hanging from a bolt - Swingers Corner! We surveyed the nice canyon, finding that both ends looped back onto the same ledge within about 5m of each other, so it’s horseshoe-shaped oxbow.

With this done, we climbed back up to continue surveying the main high-level passage. After a further 15m of scrambling through boulders we entered a larger passage, well decorated, and with signs of a previous visit. We had evidently made a connection with the upstream end of the Vegetable Patch Penthouse, and thus ended the virgin explorations. We surveyed along this for over a hundred metres, first through a large dry rocky passage with good decorations, then a muddy sloping passage with more formations. This ended when it dropped down into a sandy canon passage like the previous one. 10m ‘upstream’ this reached a window overlooking the stream 8m below, and then ‘downstream’ the canyon went for 20m to a muddy slide down onto a ledge above the stream. An easy climb down brought us to water about 20m downstream from the Vegetable Patch itself. These passages had proved much more extensive than expected and we'd been surveying for almost 5 hours, so there was no time to continue down to Mistake. We tied the survey in to the main stream and then retraced our steps through the high levels in order to retrieve Rich’s gloves, thus bypassing Swingers Corner in both directions.

Our survey notes tallied 415m of legs, but about 30/40-odd meters of that were connecting legs with survey stations in the streamway, so really, about 380m of passage was surveyed, which really surprised us. There is now about 6.2km of surveyed passage in Shannon.

In conclusion, despite not getting anywhere near our main objective, this was a really fun and productive trip! Almost 400m of passage surveyed, about 150m of which was virgin cave, with interesting and varied passages, new high-level linkages, and some epic gardening thrown in for good measure.

- Petie