Post date: Oct 4, 2012 11:02:37 PM

not peakadaw, (Brian, Eoghan, Jock, Sept 30th 2012)

Tired and broken after a day of deep pot shenanigans and night of birthday Guinness in Blacklion a Sunday stroll in Leitrim was in order.

Brian and Eoghan found Peakadaw and had a good long chat with the farmer while I busied myself doing laps of the Marlbank and Blacklion. It would appear that word of our sheep rescue exploits has spread throughout the Glen. The local family couldn't have been more accommodating, allowing us to park in their farm yard and gear up. This made the approach much more pleasant than the previous walks up from peakadaw rising. After my belated arrival we danderd up past the unusual scatterings of brown, grit/sandstone and headed on up to the main cliff face before dropping down the scree into not peakadaw. I had made a bit of an optimistic start on this this dig with Emma and Rocky a couple of weekends before. Today there was no doubt, that while it may have been quiet on our previous visit, I did hear water. Jumping for joy and happy that I hadn’t been hearing things on my first visit we eagerly stuck our heads into the dig. The waterfall sounds tantalisingly close (2-3 meters, within touching distance). We could actually hear it tanking from near the top of the scree slope 10-15 meters away. The whole entrance was booming around the base of the cliff. It had p!ssed down in the Black the night before but it was dry enough when we walked up the day after.

I reckon we have 3 options for continuing the dig:

1 – On down through the floor, try to brace up the scree slop entering on the right and hug the solid wall on the left (1 or 2 trips)

2 – Cap open a small tube directly under the roof, 3 meters on up the crack above the entrance to the dig (1 trip). Sounds weird but the waterfall was significantly louder coming out of that tube than it was in the dig at floor level.

3 – Redirect the scree slope and try to point it away from the dig so we have more room to work at floor level and less chance of being entombed by mobile scree, which moved significantly when we were doing some minor poking on Sunday. Brian also reckons the large (0.5x2m) slab that you squeeze under to get into the dig needs removed (>2 trips many bodies, Brian’s suggestion)

I am going to arrange a trip up with Gaby to look at the enclosure beside the dig. Depending on what Gaby has to say about the archaeology that may impact digging options. Thinking about it some more I’d be inclined to go for option 2.

We continued our Sunday dander on over to survey the mini rift land lying to the north west that bus and I had visited a couple of weekends ago (GPS 80083 46550). 55 meters of daylight canyon were noted under impressive towering collapsed rock pillars, 25?, 30?, 50? deep. Eoghan even managed to figure out to work the compass :)