Yorkshire's heart of darkness: Exploring the marvel that is Britain's largest cave
https://jattravel.blogspot.com/2013/10/yorkshires-heart-of-darkness-exploring.html
The 110m drop to the foot of Gaping Gill takes about a minute.
From the cloud-blemished tops of the Yorkshire Dales, in the shadow of
Ingleborough, the winch descends through a puncture in the surface and
deep into the earth.
It passes through a narrow shaft, close to the moss-covered limestone - so close you think you might graze your knees - before the chamber widens and you dive into the darkness, where no plants can grow.
It accelerates through the entrails of a waterfall before settling on slimy rock at the heart of Britain’s largest known cave – a space so vast the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral could fit inside.
This is a voyage suitable
neither for those with a fear of heights or the dark. I am thankful for
the caver standing next to me, who must have spotted my nerves as I wait
for the winch.
"Don’t worry," she says, pointing at a man standing on a boardwalk above the chasm, the steep grass verge beside him funnelling into a black void beneath his feet. He is fastening a youngish-looking boy into a small metal cage, suspended above the gulf by a wire.
"He will tell you how you should sit - and what prayers you should say."
Twice a year - at spring and August bank holidays - these cavers, who dedicate their weekends and holidays to exploring the fissures beneath the Dales, provide the general public with the opportunity to join them in Gaping Gill, otherwise inaccessible to all but the most skilled cavers.
Over two weeks they set up camp on Ingleborough’s slopes. A crane is brought up for the winch and cavers abseil into the chamber to install floodlights so their guests can see the enormity of the cavern.
These potholers are a strange bunch, with their yearning to crawl in the cold, wet and narrow corners of the world and an unnatural interest in calcified rock formations and stalagmites and stalactites.
But since the mid-nineteenth
century, when enlightened scientists first began to venture beneath the
Dales, they have uncovered a mesh of subterranean networks that extend
for scores of miles around. And Gaping Gill is their prize find.
Local superstition had the cave as bottomless: a gateway to hell. Then, in 1842, John Birkbeck, a Quaker, banker and pioneer potholer from nearby Settle, attempted the first descent.
He dug a kilometre-long trench to divert water away from the shaft and was lowered into the hole on a rope.
Birkbeck made it 55 metres down before the rope began to fray and he was forced back to the surface. It would be another 53 years before anyone would set foot in the chamber.
Twisting slightly in the winch I can see the slab of rock - now called Birkbeck’s Ledge - which marks the deepest extent of his exploration and as the rope continues to whir it soon becomes clear just how much further there is to travel.
At this stage you can still feel the warmth of the sun, the rock is flecked with moss and there is fresh air on your face. There is no sign of the bottom.
Past the ledge, however, you enter a different world. The air becomes gradually cooler and the light dims. Ordinarily it would be almost pitch black in here - except for a faint glow from the shaft 100 metres up - but the lights set up on the cave floor cast enough illumination to see a steady stream of water pouring from the left wall of the chamber.
This is the highest unbroken waterfall in England (nearly twice the height of Niagara Falls) and its echoes bounce around the rock in a ferocious ricochet; the air is freckled with the mist of its spray.
Water has been the chief architect of this cathedral of stone, 300 million years in the making. The rock from which it is formed began life near the Equator (just imagine: Yorkshire in the Tropics!), from the skeletons of countless billions of microscopic sea creatures.
When they died they fell to the sea floor and formed mud. This was compressed into sedimentary rock - limestone - which is vulnerable to chemical attack and slowly dissolves in water. And we all know there’s plenty of that in the Dales.
When rain falls on the peaks and seeps into the earth it looks for the quickest route through the rock, attacking the stone where it is weakest and expanding the canyons deep beneath the earth. In Gaping Gill, it has created a chamber that now measures 145 metres long and 35 metres high.
However, when you step off the winch onto the smooth wet stone you are not standing on the cavern floor but a pile of compacted boulders, cobbles, mud and sand – the debris of countless years of erosion. If this were cleared away the cave would be twice the size.
Édouard-Alfred Martel was the first human to set foot down here. In 1895 the famed caver - considered the father of speleology – travelled from France, his interest piqued by Birkbeck’s aborted descent.
Using a series of ladders and ropes he made it through the waterfall and set about exploring the darkness, unchanged today but for a few bedraggled tour groups and the cavers’ lights.
It takes a short time for my eyes to adjust to the gloom but the cold is immediately noticeable, not helped by the spray from the waterfall.
It had been a balmy bank holiday on the surface and I’d scoffed at the people wearing waterproofs and fleeces. The best remedy was to move and explore the chamber.
I head to the western wall, across a mudbank and onto a rock shelf. From here you can see the waterfall at its full height and, now that the chamber is illuminated, examine the geological features that are the narrative of its formation.
Beside the waterfall you can see three stalactites, ten metres long, clinging to the roof. These were only discovered in the 1980s once cavers were able to install floodlights, which gives some indication of the darkness Martel must have felt down here, alone with only candles and a magnesium lamp.
At the opposite side of the chamber sits a shallow pool of clear water, from which a thin stream seeps across shingles towards the East Slope: a terrace of boulders that reaches to the ceiling.
Through the gaps in these rocks cavers disappear on their Sisyphean mission. Through numerous expeditions they have forced a route to a larger network of caves, 25 metres below the chamber floor and at one stage had found a connecting path to the show caves at the bottom of the hill.
A rock collapse means that way is now closed and the winch from the tops remains the only route into the chamber...
And the only way out.
It passes through a narrow shaft, close to the moss-covered limestone - so close you think you might graze your knees - before the chamber widens and you dive into the darkness, where no plants can grow.
It accelerates through the entrails of a waterfall before settling on slimy rock at the heart of Britain’s largest known cave – a space so vast the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral could fit inside.
Taking the plunge: Twice a year visitors can be winched down into the chamber of Gaping Gill
"Don’t worry," she says, pointing at a man standing on a boardwalk above the chasm, the steep grass verge beside him funnelling into a black void beneath his feet. He is fastening a youngish-looking boy into a small metal cage, suspended above the gulf by a wire.
"He will tell you how you should sit - and what prayers you should say."
Twice a year - at spring and August bank holidays - these cavers, who dedicate their weekends and holidays to exploring the fissures beneath the Dales, provide the general public with the opportunity to join them in Gaping Gill, otherwise inaccessible to all but the most skilled cavers.
Over two weeks they set up camp on Ingleborough’s slopes. A crane is brought up for the winch and cavers abseil into the chamber to install floodlights so their guests can see the enormity of the cavern.
These potholers are a strange bunch, with their yearning to crawl in the cold, wet and narrow corners of the world and an unnatural interest in calcified rock formations and stalagmites and stalactites.
Hidden secrets: The rolling Yorkshire Dales conceal a little-explored underworld
Local superstition had the cave as bottomless: a gateway to hell. Then, in 1842, John Birkbeck, a Quaker, banker and pioneer potholer from nearby Settle, attempted the first descent.
He dug a kilometre-long trench to divert water away from the shaft and was lowered into the hole on a rope.
Birkbeck made it 55 metres down before the rope began to fray and he was forced back to the surface. It would be another 53 years before anyone would set foot in the chamber.
Twisting slightly in the winch I can see the slab of rock - now called Birkbeck’s Ledge - which marks the deepest extent of his exploration and as the rope continues to whir it soon becomes clear just how much further there is to travel.
At this stage you can still feel the warmth of the sun, the rock is flecked with moss and there is fresh air on your face. There is no sign of the bottom.
Legendary site: Locals used to believe the fissure led down to hell
Past the ledge, however, you enter a different world. The air becomes gradually cooler and the light dims. Ordinarily it would be almost pitch black in here - except for a faint glow from the shaft 100 metres up - but the lights set up on the cave floor cast enough illumination to see a steady stream of water pouring from the left wall of the chamber.
This is the highest unbroken waterfall in England (nearly twice the height of Niagara Falls) and its echoes bounce around the rock in a ferocious ricochet; the air is freckled with the mist of its spray.
Water has been the chief architect of this cathedral of stone, 300 million years in the making. The rock from which it is formed began life near the Equator (just imagine: Yorkshire in the Tropics!), from the skeletons of countless billions of microscopic sea creatures.
When they died they fell to the sea floor and formed mud. This was compressed into sedimentary rock - limestone - which is vulnerable to chemical attack and slowly dissolves in water. And we all know there’s plenty of that in the Dales.
When rain falls on the peaks and seeps into the earth it looks for the quickest route through the rock, attacking the stone where it is weakest and expanding the canyons deep beneath the earth. In Gaping Gill, it has created a chamber that now measures 145 metres long and 35 metres high.
Open day: Visitors are winched down into Gaping Gill by expert cavers
However, when you step off the winch onto the smooth wet stone you are not standing on the cavern floor but a pile of compacted boulders, cobbles, mud and sand – the debris of countless years of erosion. If this were cleared away the cave would be twice the size.
Édouard-Alfred Martel was the first human to set foot down here. In 1895 the famed caver - considered the father of speleology – travelled from France, his interest piqued by Birkbeck’s aborted descent.
Using a series of ladders and ropes he made it through the waterfall and set about exploring the darkness, unchanged today but for a few bedraggled tour groups and the cavers’ lights.
It takes a short time for my eyes to adjust to the gloom but the cold is immediately noticeable, not helped by the spray from the waterfall.
It had been a balmy bank holiday on the surface and I’d scoffed at the people wearing waterproofs and fleeces. The best remedy was to move and explore the chamber.
I head to the western wall, across a mudbank and onto a rock shelf. From here you can see the waterfall at its full height and, now that the chamber is illuminated, examine the geological features that are the narrative of its formation.
Delights of the Dales: The White Scar Cave, is another popular underground attraction in Yorkshire
Beside the waterfall you can see three stalactites, ten metres long, clinging to the roof. These were only discovered in the 1980s once cavers were able to install floodlights, which gives some indication of the darkness Martel must have felt down here, alone with only candles and a magnesium lamp.
At the opposite side of the chamber sits a shallow pool of clear water, from which a thin stream seeps across shingles towards the East Slope: a terrace of boulders that reaches to the ceiling.
Through the gaps in these rocks cavers disappear on their Sisyphean mission. Through numerous expeditions they have forced a route to a larger network of caves, 25 metres below the chamber floor and at one stage had found a connecting path to the show caves at the bottom of the hill.
A rock collapse means that way is now closed and the winch from the tops remains the only route into the chamber...
And the only way out.
