Post date: Feb 25, 2013 3:58:20 PM

Petie Barry, Claire Dunphy, Stephen Macnamara, Seán McAnulty, ~3 hours

WARNING - this is an open, vertical, natural cave shaft with neither ladders nor other equipment in place. It is 60m deep and has an abundance of hazardous loose rock. It requires the use of advanced Single Rope Techniques, and it CANNOT be accessed safely without specialist equipment, PPE and underground training in these techniques. There are no trustworthy anchors present. Please contact us if you are interested in learning more!

Petie invited us to help him explore this surface shaft above Gleniff/Glencar (the mine features in his thesis - plans to install bouncing castle and souvenir shop or something). Leaving Petie and Sean to do all of the prior research we tagged along merrily with some ropes and a drill.

As far as we could tell, Barton's Hole was natural though perhaps had some excavation of barytes rock. We had thought it might have been used as an access shaft to the mine but there was no evidence of ladders or bolts - just a single massive iron piton at the top.

We chucked a few stones down and chuckled at the rattle - probably about 3 and a half secs, was it? A spine-tingling echoing boom too. Starting with the big iron piton, I stuck in another couple of screws at the top and dropped over the edge. There was a grassy ledge about 5m down, where another couple of screws gave a good y-hang. Had to do a fair bit of gardening as there was a very large corner of loose rock right above the abseil route.

The route is along a barytes vein. As I learnt on this trip, barytes is very soft and friable - flakes away in your hand - and would certainly not take a bolt. However there were strategically located patches of limestone once you scraped away moss and mud - so managed to get to bottom 2 rebelays later. The rebelays give nice, airy freehangs in a massive, cavernous shaft which bellows out towards the end. The view from the bottom up is spectacular - a huge jagged patch of blue, 50m+ directly overhead.

Sean stayed on the surface to check out other parts of the mine. Due to a late start and delay in Clancy's, we were a bit short on time and Claire turned back to give Petie preference to get to bottom and get photos, etc.

At the bottom there is a sloping scree floor. A climb on one side brought us to another drop, but traversing to the side gave access to another stope with steel ladders leading both down and up. This would have originally been accessed via the other mine entrances. The ladders were in reasonably good nick. We went downwards, and then across a horizontal steel ladder (yes, dodgy as hell) into a railway tunnel. This passed several further stopes, steel ladders, and great holes in the floor, until it reached a terminal hole in the floor which Petie reckoned was a tipping hole down to the lower railway level. We didn't have the time to explore all of the multiple passages leading off. Petie got quite excited by an old cart and some other mining tools, but we had to leave quickly to get back in reasonable time.

On returning to the surface, we were treated to a panoramic view of the Sligo lights, a full moon and a clear sky. No need for headlamps on the walk back to the car. A great day of caving/mining - not often you get to bolt and descend a humungous 50m virgin* pitch in Ireland!

Steve.

*Open to contradictions on this one, but there was no evidence of previous descent of this shaft.

Steve, avec Le Grande Piton.

Entrée de Trou Barton.