Post date: Sep 22, 2019 10:30:54 PM

Team: Petie Barry, Camilla Casella, Eoghan Mullan, Stephen Macnamara

An easygoing day mostly spent on the surface, with the aim of surveying some of the smaller caves in the Shannon area, and seeing where they tie in in relation to the main cave.

K2

One of the “Free State Pots”, as I call them, a series of shakeholes just on the Southern side of the border. They probably link to Brown Shiver. I’d been here before and attempted the very tight entrance climb but backed out as I was on my own. But Steve had been down it before and slithered on down, with me following. Once down the 5m pitch, there's more bridging down to a tight squeeze to the side, and into a final drop down to a floor of sandstone boulders at -13m. It’s drafting and diggable, but it would need a fair bit of work to make it workable - it's tight and awkward and there’s loose boulders wedged between the rift walls almost the whole way down. Cleared out about 8 beer cans that someone had thrown down the cave.

Survey puts the end of the pot about 80m horizontally from the end of Brown Shiver and about 25m above.

K3

A short way south of K3, a simple climb down through an old dig to where it closes down. Could be dug but not the most promising. About 9m deep.

Pollahune

The old Shannon entrance, now a short cave relegated to the status of a historical site. We surveyed 13m of cave here, down to a depth of 8m. You drop down a climb for about 4m, then a short crawl enters a small chamber made up of large boulders separated by clay and gravel. A loose cobble slope leads down to the choked end. Easy digging but the whole area has an ominous air of imminent collapse about it. The end of Pollahune as it stands is still a full 30m above the stream in Shannon, so obviously there was a lot of down-climbing involved in getting through the entrance series back in the day.

Forestry Pot

Another historical site - this one the site of an old Reyfad Group dig from the early 00’s. Steve had been here way back in 2005, when it was still active. Back then there was about 5/6m of dug-out shaft accessible. Now it was all collapsed, with the remains of an impressive digging operation still visible. There was copious rusting scaff, old slings and rope, a well-stacked spoil heap, and a large black pipe running from the forest that we presumed must have been used for washing out mud from the dig. No surveying to be done, but we took a GPS location. This indicated that from the bottom of the old dig there was still 37m to go vertically until you hit the highest bit of JPC at Les’s Climb. It was probably never going to go. We took two lengths of galvanised scaff from the scaff pile - the only two lengths that weren’t horribly corroded, and carted them over to Polltullyard to be brought into Shannon on a later date.

Ram’s Skull Pot

A cave not in COFAC, I found this on a solo spot-holing trip about 8/9 years ago, and visited it later with Éabha. It’s about a 10 minute walk east of Tullyard, and is part of a group of holes that probably drain south towards Mistake Passage. This is an old digsite, possibly by the Reyfad Group or some British crew from the late 90’s or early 00’s. There's one or two pieces of old timber shoring in there, still doing a decent job. You climb down a rift for a few meters till you reach the old dig. A tight dodgy squeeze is passed into a low rocky chamber. You can scramble down to an abandoned dig at -10m. Marginally more interesting is a low crawl to the south that soon chokes, but it has a slight draft. Not a promising dig though.

- Petie