Post date: May 15, 2016 10:27:40 PM

Aim: Survey the cave, improve rigging.

Team:

Al: Navigation and additional rigging.

Magda: Fossil collection, sunburn collection.

Rob: Rigging, photoing, tape holding, number shouting.

Petie: Compass/clino, sketching, flashbulb holding.

Time:

6 hours caving, 3.5 hours hiking.

Hell’s Letterbox has long been on the ‘list of caves that really ought to be surveyed’, so Al promised to go and survey the cave with me. Rob Mulraney joined in, and then Al had second thoughts, unenthused by the prospect of a mucky trip surveying a cave he’d already been to multiple times. Instead he offered to hike up with myself and Rob, place some new bolts and let us survey way to our hearts content, which was just as good.

One disincentive to visiting Hell’s Letterbox is the lengthy hike to reach the cave - about 1.5 hours at a good pace. An early start was the goal, but we’d already had a long day even by the time we reached the Largy quarry. I’d been up at 6 to get the first bus out of Dublin, and then Saturday shopping, gear collection, breakfast roll collection, and a Garda diversion over the Barracashlaun mountain road, meant that Al, Magda, and I arrived at the Largy quarry at 1, with Rob rolling in half an hour later. It was two by the time we set off, followed by other distractions like chatting with a farmer, and the rare sighting of a lizard scurrying across the track. By half three we’d reached the area of Hell’s Letterbox, and it took a further half hour of walking in circles to find the actual cave itself, a relatively inconspicuous 3x7m doline. The view from the entrance is one of the best I’ve come across - it’s high up with an expansive view of Largy, Gorteenaguinnell and looking down into both Glenade and Glencar, and with Cuilcagh way off in the distance.

Al set to his rebolting. The cave was originally rigged off of two ground anchors on opposite sides of the doline making a big baggy Y-hang, but Al placed two thru-bolts at the head of the first drop to make a proper Y-hang. One of these bolts he warned was quite suspect, the other less so, but not entirely unsuspect either. Rob inaugurated the new Y-hang, which unfortunately had very large amounts of rope rub. Buoyed by confidence I followed down onto the gravelly ledge, where there were more rigging difficulties, specifically our inability to find the second Y-hang bolt. This was previously rigged as a Y-hang, though try as we might we couldn’t locate the second spit. Eventually we went down on the one good spit, though with a tackle bag placed to prevent the inevitable rope rub. This served us well, and on our exit the rope rub was minimised on both pitches. It was Breffni rope anyway.

Al and Magda departed leaving Rob and I to descend at 5 in the evening. The initial 6m pitch onto the gravelly ledge was followed by an 11m pitch into the big main chamber, with bones everywhere. Many of these were obviously quite old - we found some bones stuck to the walls, where the sediment they’d been buried in had washed away leaving them high and dry. With the main chamber and the passage off of it surveyed we tackled the steep, greasy climb up to the high level chamber. Al had described this as ‘a bold climb’, which was a bit of an understatement. Thankfully Al and Jim Warny had left an 11mm rope in place here, which made it much more reassuring. At the top was a pretty chamber, and some mucky flat-out crawls and squeezes into a small clean-washed chamber. Here Rob pushed on to the bitter end, down 12m of nasty tight muddy crawl. I took a final compass sighting from the comfy chamber down to Robs contorted head and the survey was done. We abseiled down the climb on the rope, grabbed a few photos for posterity, and then surfaced at about 11.

It was almost midnight by the time we set off from the cave entrance, and the long tramp back to the van over the moor seemed to go on forever. With Rob’s van packed up all that was left was to drive home, however the van could not be roused from its sleep, and five minutes were spent repeatedly trying to start the engine. Mercifully the van started up and we could go home, with Rob delivering me to Belcoo at two in the morning.

After processing the data I can say that Hell’s Letterbox is 111m long and 31m deep.

- Petie