Team: Aileen Brown, Roisín Lindsay, Al Kennedy, Stephen Macnamara. ~4 hours.
Our caving weekend date had been set in stone for several weeks in advance, but when it came round to it I couldn't face another trip into Pollkeeran - with caving restrictions I hadn't been to anything else this year, and I needed a change of scenery. Also Roisín was back for the week and I thought she might be interested in something more meaty. Petie suggested Ramsons as one of the items on the forthcoming expedition to-do list, so off we went on Saturday morning.
The last time any of us had been to the cave was more than 7 or 8 years ago, but we identified the turf track easily enough. We parked cars at the end of the left fork and bimbled off across the bog to relocate the hole. Within 2 minutes we were looking down on a large, tree-bounded doline. Its distance from the end of the track was more or less as I remembered, so we started exploring.
It was soon evident that this wasn't the cave any of us had been in before. However it was sizable and beckoning, and we agreed to drop it even if it wasn't Ramsons. While Al and I started exploring, Aileen and Roisín walked further afield to find the cave we had all remembered from before.
The top section was a double-shakehole, one taking a small stream. The larger shakehole was about 10-20m in diameter, and once you actually found a route in, you could scramble down to a rocky floor 3 metres below. At one side, a huge rift dropped into blackness. The girls returned at this stage and we all helped to find the best line of entry to the rift. A bit of ducking and diving through fallen trees brought me to a bomber tree root just at the lip. However the jungle rigging was short-lived - a Petzl Permanent was present some 10m below. Further down, a deviation and a rope protector later, I reached the end of the rope - but annoyingly not the end of the pitch. Eventually after getting another rope from above and rejuggling some of the rigging, we got to the bottom.
Aileen and Roisín came down, while Al stayed above on midge-watching duty. We did some poking about at the lowest point of the rift, through some very loose boulders. Without the full equipment we didn't push too far though - it looked like it needed a proper session. Next, we went to far southern corner of the rift, and Aileen pushed up into a flat-out crawl at ceiling level. This closed down after less than 10 metres, and she had to reverse out with me spotting her and Roisín spotting me.
At this stage there was not much more to do than survey out. I was experimenting with Claire's old phone and Bluetooth - and alas it ran out of battery when we were half-way up the pitch. Roisín nonetheless persisted with taking shots, and we surveyed up to the lip, and on through a connection to the other side of the double-shakehole. While this did give us the basic centreline for the upper half, another trip will be required to finish it off properly - there is quite a complex in the upper section.
Once Aileen had finished the derig, we headed back down the hill for a swim in Lough Melvin.
Epilogue:
The identity of this cave confused us all for a time. We all agreed it wasn't the cave we'd been in before. The upper section of the cave matched very closely the survey for Ramsons; however, the lower parts of the Ramsons survey seemed to fit better with where we had been before. Some research (namely reading the UBSS 1956 report) made things clearer.
The two obvious candidates for caves in the area were Ramsons Pot and Sulphur Pot. The cave we entered was actually Ramsons Pot - it matched in terms of location, depth, length and description - while the one we had been to before was in all likelihood Sulphur Pot. It matched the Sulphur description in terms of depth and location.
So, the boulder choke at the bottom of the Ramsons rift needs a bit more digging to reopen it and connect with the lower PPP chamber, and the ICC Extension. We noticed in the rift shaft some large black spaces to either side - swinging over and rerigging will probably also lead to ICC, as suggested on the Grade 1 sketch addition to the Bristol survey.
And what of Sulphur Pot? Well, it explains why we never found the ICC extension we had previously been looking for. But the lower chamber we entered 7 or 8 years ago - which we had thought to be PPP Chamber - is something else. It doesn't appear on the Bristol survey of Sulphur Pot. Another survey trip to Sulphur is needed too!
Stephen.