Post date: Jun 25, 2017 10:49:10 PM

Team: Petie Barry, Shane Diffily, Emily Punzalan

Time: 7.5 hours

A Wednesday trip to the pub established that Shane and Emily were interested in caving, so tagging along with a DCG try-caving trip we made it up to Fermanagh of a balmy Saturday morning.

On an earlier surveying trip I’d climbed into a new high-level series about 6m above the stream, a short distance upstream from ‘the anvil’ rock formation. Here about 30m of rocky passage eventually dropped into a 20m long sandy oxbow with a set of footprints. It wasn’t very significant but it was just about worth surveying. So then, the plan for the day was to survey this short bit and head down and look for Steve Bus’s Hidden Parallel Passage.

Anyone reading these trip reports will by now have noticed a pattern whereby the plan to survey a particular passage is upscuttled by the discovery of entirely different sets of passage - this trip was no different. Just as we arrived at the passage to be surveyed I spotted a different high-level oxbow about 4m above the stream. With a bit of help from Shane I pulled myself into this, looped through 20m of narrow sand-floored canyon to re-emerge into the main passage on a huge false floor of jammed boulders. Here there was a number of balconies looking down into the main stream and other oxbows. We surveyed this but we didn’t push the boulder floor area as it was fairly dodgy - a lot of instability about.

Once this was done we started on the bit of passage we’d intended to start with. After a few legs Shane had to go off and help Emily up from a lower level and I took this opportunity to look into a promising sandy crawl off to one side. After a bodylength this popped into a typical narrow sandy oxbow of about 20 metres length, and ending in a choke close to the main passage. After going back to the others I was in two minds about surveying this since it wasn’t that interesting and meant a lot of short fiddly legs but decided (thankfully as it turned out) that it was worth doing.

Having by now been in a lot of these high-level passages you get to read them quite well, and they have particular characteristics at particular levels above the stream. 4-5m above the stream you get tall narrow sandy oxbow canyons, and another 4-5m above this level you break into a much larger passage. So far on this trip we’d been in the sandy oxbow level, which tends to make for small, fairly unexciting passages. Sometimes though, when you’re in the sandy canyons you can climb up the walls into the bigger passage above. So while surveying this uninteresting oxbow I though to look up and saw a black space overhead in a gap between boulders in the roof of the passage. Shunting my way up to this and then through the boulders I found myself in a big chamber, much like Absalom’s Attic, with a sweeping wall of water-worn rock and muddy boulders climbing steeply up into the roof. Nice.

While Shane and Emily were climbing up I assessed the options. ‘Downstream’ there was a nasty looking route up big sketchy boulders into a gaping black rift. Ducking under boulders in the middle of the chamber led to a suspect-looking climb up an overhanging boulder with a walking-height passage heading in an upstream direction beyond. ‘Upstream’ looked easy but unpromising. We surveyed ‘upstream’ and sure enough it went closed off after 15m. We then pushed ‘downstream’, up and over the nasty exposed boulder pile into the passage beyond. Here the way on was less certain. The most promising route was back up a steep and loose boulder/mud slope that I really didn’t fancy climbing. There was also a route descending into boulders but it looks to be heading back down into the lower level where we’d come from. We left the survey hanging here since we’d run out of time.

Just before dropping back down out of this passage I went back to the passage under the boulders in the middle of the chamber and gave the climb up the boulder a try. It wasn’t so bad after all. This entered a lovely tall fossil canyon. I romped up this for about 30m to a dramatic ledge with the stream audible below. Possibly still going around the bend but I didn’t hang about here. Exactly 150m surveyed over the course of the evening. Mostly virgin.

Other notes:

• This particular bit of Shannon was particularly loose, even by Shannon standards. There was much kicking of loose boulders down pitches.

• Shane’s downstream crossing of Swingers Corner was genuinely world-class, floating soundlessly across and landing on the gravel bank with a gentle ‘plish’ of water. It was a welcome contrast to Emily’s deafening splash.

• It’s called the Stationmaster Series because it was Shane’s first time surveying and he was on station duty.

• We would have finished the Shannon survey months ago if it wasn’t for all this damn virgin passage we keep finding.

• Shannon is now longer than Reyfad. Just over 7km of passage now surveyed.

- Petie