Gaping Gill Winch Meet 2002

23 August 2002 - Although it actually runs for about a week

This is great - I recommend it to anyone. Twice a year the local caving groups organise a winch meet at Gaping Gill, 2½ miles from Clapham, where members of the public can just turn up, pay £8, and go down and mooch around in the biggest cave in England. It's brilliant, and everyone should do it.

This August bank holiday (2002) it was Craven Potholing Club who organised the winch meet, and did a fine job too.

Basically, you drive to Clapham. You walk 2½ miles (uphill, quite rocky) to the site, you pay the nice people £8, and they drop you down a hole.

Well, no, that's not really true. They give you a helmet, and you queue and wait your turn, then you sit in a fairly comfortable steel chair, and get a quick briefing to keep your feet and elbows tucked in, and not to worry about the rocks hitting you. Then a trapdoor underneath you slides back, you look down, and you're hanging over the biggest, deepest hole you can imagine. It's just bottomless.

The ride down is fast. Rocks whistle past your knees, about 6 inches away, and you just sit there hoping they know what they're doing. Then you get hit by quite a bit of water, and then everything opens out (the top section of the shaft is quite narrow) and you're in this enormous cave, with serious-looking people in all kinds of proper caving gear wandering around, looking business-like. You land at the bottom, more cavers help you out and show you around. We had a nice chap called Sean Karlet give us a twenty minute tour of the main chamber, showing us the rock formations, the routes out (there are 5) and telling us about the history of the cave complex here.

Gaping Gill is the biggest cave in England. I'm told it's the size of York Minster, and I believe it. The ride down is 340ft, opening out into a chamber 426ft long, 82ft wide and 103ft high.

The 'floor' of the main chamber is fairly level, mainly pebbles and sand, but the more you look around and listen to what the potholers are telling you, you realise that the cave isn't static at all. There's weather down there, wind, and when the floods come everything moves around. A lot.

Taking photos down there is tricky. The space is too big for flash. No light to work with except the occasional electric/gas lamp dotted around. There's lots of water in the air. Very tricky. Sean let me use his tripod, which was kind, but I still failed to take anything that does the place any sort of justice.

You can wander around down there as long as you like, then ask the people at the bottom nicely, and they'll slap you back in the seat for the ride back up.

An enormous amount of work is done by the CPC to get everything in place and working smoothly and safely. Apart from all the scaffolding and winch gear, they dam the beck above the main shaft (normally water streams down exactly where the winch is) so that the beck finds it's way in elsewhere.

The Gaping Gill Winch Meet is all about weather. If it rains enough (and this is the Pennines, it could happen) water will eventually flood the cave to a depth of about 60 feet. Not that this happens in ten minutes, but conditions can change quickly and a careful eye is kept on the weather incase they have to get everyone back up to the surface again rapid. In the worst case scenario, if there isn't enough time to get everyone up by winch, members of the public will have to be led out by experienced potholers through one of the alternative exits.

For more information on the Gaping Gill Winch Meets (there are two each year) see:

Spring Bank Holiday:
Bradford Pothole Club: www.bpc-cave.org.uk

August Bank Holiday:
Craven Pothole Club: www.cravenpotholeclub.org

There's also some line drawings and plans of the Gaping Gill cave system at: www.sat.dundee.ac.uk/~arb/yorkshire/gaping-ghyll.html

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