Author: Jon Telling

The trip started (too!) early on boxing day morning ; everyone piling on the boat from Dover - Calais, and driving down through France (Steve and Andy in their vans, Simon and me grabbing a lift in Tim’s ’not so new as it used to be’ Peugeot 206). Journey highlights: Tim managing 110 mph in his supposedly 105 mph max. car (later - in what can only be described as a near-death experience - he managed to force a French driver off the road and up a grass verge!), and a night stop-ov er on the way down in a cheap Fl hotel where a combination of red wine, whisky, 2 bunk-beds and various odd bodily positions (ooh-err) left me with overstretched ligaments in a knee. Not the best start!

The caving itself was pretty spectacular ; Pucelle in particular. A large underground stream running 2.5 km through spectacular limestone formations - Swildon’s on a grand-scale. Scrambling and sometimes swimming along, shooting down wa terfalls on your arse, all good fun. Not so fun was losing £300 worth of tackle in a particularly deep plunge-pool (“Do you think it’ll float?” “Maybe, if you keep a hand on it. Ahh.”) - unfortunately preventing us from reaching the bottom.

Iges de Pendent was a good SRT trip - 115 m down, lots of be-lays, a splash round in the underground stream, and up again. And the Iges de Sol ; a 60 m initial drop through a vertical shaft into large caverns with huge limestone formations, ending in a small cavern with almost every spot taken up with mud sculptures of various kinds ; some superb, others not, most with large , er, genitalia (saying something about cavers’ mentality in general?) by previous artistically-inspired cavers. UBBS now have their own sculpture along similar lines.

New Years eve was similar to the other days (cave during the day, hit the beer/wine in the evening), only more so. Even so, we all managed to go caving on New Year’s Day (after fixing the drainpipe on the roof - ask Simon!).

Overall, definitely worth the visit, and I’ll make the bottom of Pucelle next time