Tim Allen's team of diggers have been incredibly successful over the past 10 years and Five Ways is one of their newer discoveries. Located on Dowlas Moor with views down over Crina Bottom, the entrance is very nicely located and we were very lucky to have a beautifully sunny, if somewhat blowy, walk up.
I had commented to Ade during the drive from the hut how much more interesting it is to do a cave 'blind'. Not that kind of blind, of course, but the kind where you know almost nothing about the trip and everything is a surprise. Apart from knowing I'd read something in Descent a while ago, and that there was quite a lot of passage and potential for getting lost, I was on just that position.
We headed on down and soon found ourselves sliding down the impressive rebar-reinforced shoring ... 10 consecutive drops down a large rift that must have taken hundreds (in fact, maybe thousands) of hours of work. Beyond this the small chamber was reached that gave the cave its name. We headed down the obvious passage and descended a couple of really nice pitches. A few more slightly shorter pitches later and we were at the bottom. Nobody fancied the 4m grovel in a stream to an apparently small sump so we swiftly about turned.
Ade and I diverted past Basil the baby badger (initially thought to be a fox apparently) to find the soaring and rather damp aven that Descent tells me is 30m up and so far Tim Allen has only made it up 20m. No doubt he's waiting for a very dry spell. The water here runs into a tight and impenetrable rift never to be seen again. Descent notes that this is also a lead for another day.
Back on the surface, I reflected on the fact that I had thought there was quite a lot of passage but that we had definitely not found it. It turns out I was thinking of F'ing Hopeless Pot ... another one of Tim's successes waiting for me to tick off.
Party: Ade, Al, Paul, Damian
Time: 3 hrs?
