Post date: Oct 10, 2016 10:29:38 PM

The Bunch of Lads:

Petie

Rob

Michal

The aim of this trip was to drop a few pots along Series 4 to gather info for the second Irish Speleology article on Largy, and check a few other spots in the area. Most of the sites had either already been described by SUSS, or had been identified on a 2012 spot-holing trip. With the lions share of the article in place, we just needed to gather up a few loose ends, tick a few boxes, and then let Largy sit for another half-century until a new generation of cavers arrived up on the moor. Simples.

With this in mind, I set off from Dublin on Saturday evening, and Rob kindly collected me from the bus station and sheltered me in his house for the night. The next morning we got in the van and set off for Largy. At Manorhamilton we stopped to get supplies at Supervalu, which was where we met Michal, who’d alreadly been to the quarry and back, such was our lateness.

We finally set off from the quarry around 12:30 and reached the Series 4 a mere 40 minutes later, making a pleasant change from the usual hour and a half long slog. We soon dropped the first pot on Series 4, which wasn’t very interesting. A 12m pitch dropped into a rocky chamber, with a further few metres descent and that was it. The next one along the series was more promising, having the sound of a stream from below.

While I busied myself with survey notes, and Rob fiddled with the rigging, Michal simply strode down to the bottom along a loose rift to the east. I followed in his tracks, while Rob rigged a pleasant pitch from a tree above. This cave was already visited and described by SUSS 50-odd years earlier, but it was a nice find nonetheless - a bit deeper than the first cave at 18m, and very dramatic with sun streaming in from above, a stream rising and sinking at the bottom and a scree slope of clean-washed gravel climbing up into an aven further on down the rift. Some lovely faulting visible as well.

We checked a few other pisant pots before arriving at a blind doline with filled with a single tree. Attached to this was a satellite doline with a 1m diameter hole that our spotholing report said was ‘worth a look’. It didn’t look like much, but Michal disappeared on down a rope and shouted up to say it was interesting. Rob and I followed on down into the 8m deep pot and indeed it was interesting. At the bottom of the pitch was a roomy little chamber, a huge calcite crystal the size of a football on the floor, a flowstone cascade and deflated sheep (a sheep had died fairly recently in an alcove, leaving behind just a sodden wool fleece lying on the mud like a dirty rug. It was pretty funny actually).

The final cave to be checked was on Series 3, a supposedly 8m deep pot, with a possible continuation. All we had to do was to pronounce it speleologically worthless and the article would be done! We could see the bottom from the edge and the continuation didn’t look very promising, but Rob rigged it anyway. At the bottom there was some grumblings, then Rob shouted up to say that he’d found something. I followed down and Rob chucked a rock to the end of a small crawl off the bottom. Boom boom boom. Cue about 20minutes trying to figure out how to get into the said booming rift. Rob eventually got down far enough on some wacky rigging to see into a large black chamber, which he reckoned was bigger than the main chamber in Hell’s Letterbox! Interesting indeed. We were fairly confident that this was a virgin cave, and Rob estimated that he got down about 15m, with at least another five to get into the chamber.

We exited the cave, then a very fast walk off the mountain was followed by a mad dash across Leitrim and Sligo to catch the last bus home to Dublin. We got it with about 30 seconds to spare. With my mind idling on the bus back to Dublin, I remembered that SUSS’s Series Three had some caves on it that were largish, and worried that our find mightn’t be virgin after all. Sure enough, after checking the SUSS expedition report, I found a brisk report that more or less matched what we found. SUSS reckon the cave is 20m deep, down to a pool of water with no way on. Oh well. It remains to survey and fully explore this intriguing cave, which appears to be the second-largest on the 3, 4, 5 Series’s.

Largy continues to surprise.

Petie