Topic

Arriving at the hut I was accosted by Ales who seemed to be desperate to go caving while everyone else seemed to be settling down to beers. After some dithering we headed off to Skirwith(?) which is the old showcave near Ingleton that Keith and I had failed to find on a previous occasion. Fortunately this time we knew where we were going as Nigel had shown us the entrance a few weeks before so we had little trouble finding the entrance even in the dark.

The trip was fairly uneventful although it was interesting to see how the old walkways had been crushed by falling rocks. When we reached the waterfall we decided not to keep going as we would have required a soaking but our caving appetites were still unsatisfied.

Back at the car I rang Nigel and after some rudimentary directions and some route finding instructions (which turned out to be wrong) we were off to Great Duke. We found the cave with no difficulties and were soon walking up some nice streamway. As we were reaching the end and the cave got a lot lower Ales started talking about turning until I reminded him it was a through trip - I was doing this while standing at the end of the crawls although I didn't know that at the time so I'm glad we didn't turn back.

Once Ales got through and I avoided the bloody huge spiders we were soon out of the cave and had a rather uneventful walk back to the cars on a beautiful moonlight night.

Party: Ales, Brian Cullen

I'm glad Nigel remembered where it was, It took us a while to find it first time round including following his GPS into the wrong field

Theres also a picture of lionel in one Decent standing nex to the gours in the entrance too