Badger Pot, 28 May 2022

Team: Steve Muh, Aileen, Petie

Time: 7.5 hours

Almost 10 months had elapsed since we’d found the top of the 25-odd metre pitch which almost surely dropped down into the large chamber in Fenagh. After the initial breakthrough I’d returned on a flying visit with Peter Ward, and bolted the first pitch. I had a go at the main pitch also but was defeated by the lack of good limestone around the pitch head. That final trip was also markedly wet, with a small stream making it almost as far as the squeezy bends. This suggested that as winter approached the cave would likely become inaccessible due to high water levels. So it would probably be next summer before we’d be likely to access the cave.

And so the summer rolled around, and after a reasonably dry spell it felt as if the coast was clear for an attempt on the pitch. Steve and Aileen went ahead with the rigging gear while I lumbered along behind with the survey. After another winter of rain the entrance crawl has washed out a bit more, it’s almost becoming comfortable! Along the way to the main pitch Steve did some additional rigging, putting an extra bolt at the head of the first pitch, and bolting the climb that came after it for rope. This is a fairly straightforward free-climb, but the fact that a 200kg slab at the lip of the climb that we’d been climbing over on the previous visits came loose and had to be kicked down the pitch probably influenced his decision to put in rope.

At the main pitch itself things slowed down while Steve tried to work out a plan of attack for the rigging. There was a huge amount of chert in this part of the cave, meaning that the useable limestone was in unhelpful or hard-to-reach places, so the final rig was a wonky zig-zagging traverse out to a single bolt, with a deviation hooked around the tip of a chert protrusion on the opposite wall. We all abseiled down the 16m pitch, hoping to Christ that the deviation wouldn’t slip off the protrusion. At the bottom there was a windy drippy ledge, but with lots of good limestone this time for the final 8m pitch down into Fenagh. Down we went, and tied into the survey station from two years ago. The depth came to 63m, deeper than the 56m of Fenagh, but the Fenagh survey wasn’t done with an incliniometer so the depth was always going to be a bit off.

With five hours of caving behind us we turned here and made it out an hour and a half later. The rope and hangars were removed but the screws left in to help with re-finding them. Next job is to return to survey and explore the crawls at the bottom of the cave.

Petie