Gautries Hole - Dominika Wróblewska

Present: Dominika, Ann, Phil, Alastair, Charley

Thanks for a great trip guys; it was much fun!!! Sorry if some facts are mixed up but it was hard to put things in the right order!

We met at the Chapel at 11am. I came in through the door just as the final group of students was about to leave for a trip. I noticed on the blackboard that there were 3 different caving trips happening – 2 to Peak cavern and one to Nettle Pot (?). I found out in the kitchen that Louise had overslept so were one caver down. Soon after that Charley appeared from upstairs and announced that David, who was supposed to help him fix something upstairs, couldn’t come. In that case, Charley said, the fixing wasn’t going to happen and so he went with us underground.

We disputed over a piece of information in the cave description, which said that we would need 12m of rope or a ladder and a lifeline to descend one pitch. Both Charley and Ann claimed there wasn’t a pitch that needed SRT, Phil wasn’t sure, and me and Alastair had never been there before. Just to be safe, we packed a ladder. We drove in two cars and parked them at a lay-by off the road leading to Sparrowpit. The lay-by potentially only ever used by cavers who know the secrets which lie beyond it.

It was a very warm day and compared with two weeks before full of snow and ice, it felt like spring had arrived. Standing outside in a furry under suit was very pleasant and we lazily changed into our caving gear without rushing. Once ready, we went through a field and stopped at a large sinkhole that lied behind the fence with a stile. I looked at the bottom step of the stile, which looked very new – Phil pointed out that it looked like Alan’s job. We went past the first ditch, which looked like a small crater, then stopped at the second one after it. At the bottom was the entrance to Gautries Hole. The ditch was overgrown, mossy, and full of dead leaves and I’d noticed a lonesome car tyre sticking out in a distance. Ann mentioned that they had done a major clean-up of the area a while ago and pulled out all sorts of stuff from there.

Phil got to the entrance first and stood with his back to the curved rock wall grinning. He brought his hand to his ear. I stopped to listen and I heard it straight away – strong gurgling, flowing sound of water was coming out from within. We followed it in. The cave entrance was one of the most photogenic cave entrances I’d seen for a while. The passages at the beginning were clean and visibly shaped by water, which used to run through them. We crawled through and got to a chamber, which had a few ways on. We had a look at a passage on the far end of the chamber to the left. A knotted rope hung down and led us even lower. Once on top of the rope, I saw Phil’s light coming in through a small round hole at the bottom left of the climb. I could see that the spot beyond was larger. I squeezed through the hole and slid down. There was a sump at the end of the passage where me, Phil, and Ann were now sat in while Charley and Alastair observed it through the hole. The sump was of long triangular shape and the water was in an untouched state – green and crystal clear. Above the sump, the passage’s ceiling was leaning downwards and a strange formation was hanging down joining the two narrow sides of walls. The rock there was of lighter colour than the surrounding walls and had a few oval holes in it looking as if something had dissolved it. We contemplated the site for a while and then went back out and continued on the main route with Phil leading the way. This time we went up and that brought us to the infamous Muddy Duck – a squeeze through a hole at the bottom of the wall with water reaching almost up to the roof (perhaps with something like 5cm of airspace). The thickness of the wall in front of us luckily wasn’t too wide and thanks to that one could easily pass that obstacle. I must say that however easy it was to pass it, pleasant it was not. I lied down in the water face first and debated for a while whether it wouldn’t be easier to do it on my back rather than stomach. I went for the stomach and squeezed through with my head turned to the right for air. I forgot to close my eyes, which got immediately flooded with muddy liquid. First few seconds after the submersion leave you in a state of disgusted shock – you can feel the muddy water running down your back, penetrating every piece of clothing. The shock doesn’t last long and once you start moving again and arrive at new obstacles, it is pretty much forgotten. Ann, Charley, and Alastair passed the Duck and now they too, bizarrely christened by the cave, were completely drenched. We ventured into the further passages still unaware of how muddy they would be. Pool Chamber was the gateway to all that mud ahead. The chamber itself held a lot of mud too – in the middle the mud was so intense, it sucked you in and made it hard to free yourself from it. I fell over multiple times trying to climb up the slippery slope. Phil had a look into one tube which we thought was the way on but it was full of water and dead worms and therefore we decided not to go in it.

We slid down another muddy slope next to it instead, following a rope. The fun of sliding down muddy slopes will never get old. After the first layer of sediment was applied to our backs, we followed the meandering passage ahead. Soon enough it ended with a sump and we all had to turn back and look for another way on. Gautries Hole, like many other caves, seemed like a maze to me and without studying the survey prior to the trip, I was even more clueless. That said, none of us really knew where to go exactly, so we just decided to explore any other possible ways on and see where they go. Alastair went up a knotted rope into a passage on the right and disappeared into a tube. We followed. The passage, though it sometimes widened, was tight and required crawling; it was interrupted by intervals of 2 water pools, at times so deep that one could almost stand up in them while going through. I was on all fours and didn’t realise how deep the second pool was until in the middle of it. The floor dropped down and the water reached up to my chin. Alastair must have gone through the passages at the speed of light as he was nowhere to be seen or heard. The passage became tighter and tighter; the roof in one section of it was very eroded and hung low. The floor also kept changing – from mud to water to pebbles and thick sand. Our route was sloping upwards throughout the 2nd part of the crawl and therefore made the slippery muddy surrounding into an additional obstacle. Luckily someone had put a rope running along the middle of the tube we were dragging ourselves through and pulling yourself up with it sometimes helped. Sometimes also grabbing onto a rock in front or clawing your fingers into the thick mud on the floor and pulling would also help. I’m sure there were many more techniques others used in this horizontal ascent. I could hear Phil’s sounds of struggle behind, which suggested that he was now trying to squeeze through one of the tight holes I had battled with seconds ago. The next hole was even more difficult and up a steeper slope. I looked through it and saw Alastair’s light. We greeted each other. He said there was another passage at the end of that one and that it was going down. He was waiting for us before trying to go down in case something went wrong and nobody was around. I followed him to the end of our passage and saw him sliding down the slope through another mud filled tube supported with a knotted rope. ‘I’m sliding on my back into the unknown’ - indeed he couldn’t see past his legs which were obstructing the view. After a few moments he decided to return back up; by this time Phil had arrived and we could hear Charley approaching. I decided to go down the tube next to see if it goes anywhere; I slid down and observed that the tube got tighter but more level. The air also seemed much fresher down there comparing to the previous passage which stank of something strange. I considered going down further but before that asked if anybody would follow if it does continue. I was met with a negative response. We created some space to let Charley in and rotate so that he wouldn’t have to crawl all the way back backwards. Going back was much easier and we all slid down the muddy tubes on our stomachs like on a strange kind of playground filled with mud of melted chocolate consistency and lots of hazards. One of the hazards was the rocks that were waiting to hit your face if you slid down too frivolously.

We reunited with the knotted rope at the exit from the passage and continued our exploration trying another hole on the opposite side. Ann went up first and squeezed up into another small muddy chamber with a wooden plank going across it – it was the only way in which one could stand in there as it was directly above the hole in the floor. I climbed up after her and decided to continue further up through another hole, which led to yet another muddy chamber, this time filled with boulders between which some scaffolding held the rocks in place. I went up through the scaffolding to see if anything continued further but unfortunately it was a dead end. All brown and cold, we returned via an alternative route and emerged out into Pool Chamber. This time Ann got her feet sucked into that mud pool in the middle of the chamber and wrestled with it for a while and as she did, the mud played the most delightful sounds. We climbed back up the knotted rope and squeezed through the hole that led to the Muddy Duck. Charley went in first and because of his height, he decided it would be easier to go through it head first and on his back. He gave me his glasses and asked me to pass them over when he’s through. I repeated my technique of head first and on the stomach, again turning my head to the right for air and this time I closed my left eye that was under water. To be honest, closing the eye didn’t really do much good – yes, the muddy water didn’t go into it but now it was running down the left side of my face and over my closed eye, not letting me open it. As I was crawling with only one eye open, Charley remarked he couldn’t see anything because his glasses were covered in mud. I guess we were all in the same situation. Before exiting the cave, me, Charley, and Phil had a look at some more passages in that part of the cave (now also known as the clean part). We hit a junction with 4 more possible ways on, all of which we checked and all of which were dead ends or appeared impassable. We’ve spotted lots of those mysterious holes going off the passages in Gautries and it seemed that most of them were abandoned digs from times unknown.

We retraced our ‘steps’ and headed for the exit. The exit hole looked out on the bottom rock wall of the overgrown ditch. It had a strange green glow and it was a very pleasant thing to look at while still in the darkness of the cave.

Gautries Hole. Illustration Copyright © Dominika Wróblewska.