Ogof Craig yr Ffynnon, South Wales. Photo by Stuart Alldred.
Welcome to the first newsletter of the new term! Summer was busy with expeditions and you'll be hearing more about those in the next few issues/ There's a packed programme ahead for the autumn months, with a great mix of caving and social events.
For everyone who came along to met us at Welcome Fair and joined the club WhatsApp Chat, if you're new to the club, please make sure you let our treasurer have your name and email address for future comms. You'll need to purchase your membership via the SU website before you're eligible to join any of our caving trips. Membership is only £12!
And if you make it through to the end of this issue, you'll be in with a chance of winning a prize, too!
If you would like to check out previous issues, you can find them all here, including the scanned archive of all our paper issues.
For everyone who came along to met us at Welcome Fair and joined the club WhatsApp Chat, if you're new to the club, please make sure you let our treasurer have your name and email address for future comms. You'll need to purchase your membership via the SU website before you're eligible to join any of our caving trips. Membership is only £12!
And if you make it through to the end of this issue, you'll be in with a chance of winning a prize, too!
If you would like to check out previous issues, you can find them all here, including the scanned archive of all our paper issues.
Linda and Billy
PS As ever, if the text is in blue and underlined, it's a clickable link, so go on, venture in, you know it makes sense.
In this issue:
- Introducing Caving
- Dates for Your Diary
- Meet the Committee
- Events
- Your Guide to the UBSS Hut
- In Other Hut News
- Of Caterpillars and Kings - a trip to Craig yr Ffynnon in South Wales
- Kermit and Co Go Surveying - the 2025 UBSS trip to County Clare
- Ireland 2025 - A pictorial history
- UBSS at Bristol's Brilliant Archaeology
- Read to the End
- Introducing Caving
- Dates for Your Diary
- Meet the Committee
- Events
- Your Guide to the UBSS Hut
- In Other Hut News
- Of Caterpillars and Kings - a trip to Craig yr Ffynnon in South Wales
- Kermit and Co Go Surveying - the 2025 UBSS trip to County Clare
- Ireland 2025 - A pictorial history
- UBSS at Bristol's Brilliant Archaeology
- Read to the End
Poster by Jess Brock
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY
Check the WhatsApp Group for when tickets for the first term's caving events will be released and for joining details for the chilli night and the cowstail's pub crawl. For the chilli night, to find the venue, follow the access road to the side of no 21, and carry on until you find the building to the left of the bike sheds.
Check the WhatsApp Group for when tickets for the first term's caving events will be released and for joining details for the chilli night and the cowstail's pub crawl. For the chilli night, to find the venue, follow the access road to the side of no 21, and carry on until you find the building to the left of the bike sheds.
MEET THE COMMITTEE!
YOUR GUIDE TO THE UBSS HUT
Guide produced by Jess Brock
IN OTHER HUT NEWS ...
Thanks to Chris Pepper's efforts, we now have a second new double burner in the kitchen at the Hut, replacing the elderly, corroded burners we've had for a while. Improvements like this are financed from the Hut Fund, do to ensure that we're able to keep up with the improvements to our beloved Hut, please make sure you pay your hut fees whenever you stay here. On organised weekends like freshers' weekend and bonfire weekend, these are included in the price for the weekend, but for all other stays, don't forget to cough up the dosh you owe!
Thanks to Chris Pepper's efforts, we now have a second new double burner in the kitchen at the Hut, replacing the elderly, corroded burners we've had for a while. Improvements like this are financed from the Hut Fund, do to ensure that we're able to keep up with the improvements to our beloved Hut, please make sure you pay your hut fees whenever you stay here. On organised weekends like freshers' weekend and bonfire weekend, these are included in the price for the weekend, but for all other stays, don't forget to cough up the dosh you owe!
OF CATERPILLARS AND KINGS
Stuart Alldred almost had to eat a Colin the Caterpillar birthday cake all to himself, but thanks to good friends, he was still able to join them for a trip to Craig yr Ffynnon.
I received a text from Mike Waterworth inviting me to go caving with him and Oli Dawson - and it just so happened to be on my birthday. Even better, it was to a cave I’d long thought I’d visited but apparently hadn’t!
And why did Stu leave it this long to visit a cave this beautiful?
We planned to meet on the Welsh side of the bridge and drive the rest of the way together. That plan was immediately derailed when I got stuck on the M48, just a few hundred metres short of the bridge… right after it closed. I sat there watching seven police cars, several ambulances, and the coast guard race past. Assuming I wouldn’t be caving on my birthday after all, I texted the others to carry on without me and contemplated eating the entire caterpillar cake which was staring at me from the passenger seat.
It's definitely worth the wait, despite the traffic!
After an hour the traffic began to move, so I dashed to the cave entrance. Thankfully I have some lovely friends who had waited for me, and I was able to catch up and join them at the lay-by.
The Hall of the Mountain King.
We got changed, shared some cake, and set off for the cave. The trip itself was great fun, and we quickly made our way to the Hall of the Mountain King. The way out was a little slower, as we paused to take photos as it is incredibly pretty and surprisingly muddy.
Gour pools and muddy cavers.
Back at the car there was, of course, more cake (because why not). Overall, it was a brilliant birthday trip despite spending way more time in my car than underground. I can also confirm that caterpillar cakes make an excellent accompaniment to caving adventures!
Stuart Alldred
KERMIT & CO GO SURVEYING
This summer’s Irish trip got stuck into an impressive amount of surveying, even discovering a section of new passage in the Coolagh River Cave. Moon Devendra gives their first impressions of Co Clare caves …
I’ve always thought that going caving with someone involves putting yourself in a potentially emotionally vulnerable position. As someone who finds it quite difficult to keep a cool head when presented with a challenge in a cave, I find that you develop a deeper relationship with the people you are caving with, compared to doing any other activity. Caving often involves pushing myself to (and sometimes past) my limit, but the people that accompany me truly made me feel supported and safe while trying something new, which was a really lovely feeling. An element of going to Ireland that felt particularly meaningful to me was becoming part of this ongoing 60-year project by UBSS (We first went to Co. Clare in 1948, Ed.). To be part of a tradition of the club, something bigger than myself, was incredibly enticing, and the idea felt quite special and unique - a character-building experience that I could learn and grow from.
This is why on the 24th of August, I joined Lee and Dan Runcan bundled into Ash Gregg’s car journeying together from Bristol, ready to plunge into the depths of Irish caves surveying for two weeks. We were joined by Sioned Haughton on Monday evening of the second week, and on the weekend by Sean Thompson from Belfast.
Getting to Ireland was a formidable 12-hour journey with a palatable 9.30am start. Four hours driving to Fishguard in South Wales from Bristol, then hours of pissing around on the way to Rosslare Harbour, admiring the silky turquoise depths of the Irish sea, and meeting the ferry mascot, a porpoise aptly named ‘Happy’, and then a four hour drive to Lisdoonvarna in County Clare, our base location for this trip. I wasn’t expecting to stay in an idyllic little cottage in the middle of nowhere on a caving trip, but it came as a pleasant surprise.
Left to right: Dan Runcan, Kermit, Moon and Lee.
For those not in the know, typically a survey group consists of three people, the affectionately named ‘dog’, whose sole purpose is to find and mark new stations (points of reference from which to take readings from), the person taking readings using the disto (device used to measure the distance between stations using a laser), and the person drawing up the readings into something that actually reflects the cave’s layout. For the first week, we had to split into two groups of two to survey different sections, but this is actually ideal when surveying tight passages, so it wasn’t too bad.
I’ve never done any sort of surveying, but after being taught how the disto works, a brief stint of surveying the house, and having the words ‘do not drop this into a puddle’ embossed into my mind by Ash and Dan, I felt fairly well prepared, though nothing can really prepare you for crawling through a barely person-shaped passage, face-to-welly with the people in front and behind you, marking stations in the mud with nail polish and then smearing them away during an ill-angled shuffle, mud on every surface including the disto to the point where it becomes difficult to differentiate between person and cave. Most of the surveying, thankfully, was in passages you could stoop or stand in, but the surveying past the southern branch of the West Series was certainly memorable.
Polldonough Main Entrance with a significant stream. Photo by Dan Runcan.
Even on the first day, I could never ignore the beauty of the forests in which Irish caves are situated. They truly look straight out of Irish folklore, like they should be brimming with fairies and elves. I’ve never seen woods so fairytale, blanketed in soft layers of luminescent green moss and brambles so thick that you needed an oversuit to venture past them, neatly decorated with uniform lines of wispy pine trees. The Coolagh River Cave’s main entrance was picturesque, making the perilous wade through thorns to access it more than worthwhile.
We determined if the cave was safe to venture into by observing the depth of the river flowing into the entrance - we had a reference image of a boulder directly outside the cave entrance and the degree to which it was submerged, and on wet days we’d compare the submersion of the boulder to that of the image to determine whether or not we’d be swallowed alive by the gushing streamway.
The south entrance to the Coolagh River Cave began with a lovely rusted iron ladder leading directly into a crawl through the streamway. Irish cavers had also reinforced the cave entrance with a lovely plastic drum, which made climbing in and out of the cave a breeze. The challenge for me personally began with navigating the anxiety-inducing Double Passage where a layer of rock shelf opened up in an hourglass shape to a large gap, this pattern happening in reverse to meet the true floor of the cave. The gap felt decidedly Moon-shaped, menacing and omnipresent every time I looked downwards, but caving has a beautiful way of making you face fears that you didn’t even know you had in real time, and as we went through it again and again, the distance downwards became evermore bearable.
Ash Gregg in the south entrance to Coolagh River Cave. Photo by Dan Runcan.
To get to our surveying destination, we had to trudge through a section of mud with the viscosity and texture of peanut butter, which clings to you, threatening to absorb you and drag you into its suffocating depths with an alarming amount of force, a kind of mud I’ve personally never experienced before, and I hope it subsides by next year. The passages we surveyed were remarkably dry compared to the wet sludge we’d travel through to arrive there - nice and manoeuvrable. Sean had never done any surveying before despite caving for four years, so it was really enjoyable to experience how enthusiastic he was about it. Something that's quite fun about surveying down long corridors is aligning the stations, so they can be the furthest distance apart while still being representative of the cave and its idiosyncrasies.
My absolute favourite photo from the trip was taken in this section. One of Ash standing thigh deep in a dense layer of foam coating the walls and water we waded through. It honestly felt like standing in a very cold cappuccino.
They don't normally serve this in Costa! Photo by Sean Thompson.
I found that you can make the caving (and surveying) as difficult or as easy as you’d like it to be. Feeling rather ambitious, early in the first week, Ash and I went through the West Series to survey the peculiarly named ‘Pink Panther Passage’, a section discovered by Ash after he (using a loose rock) valiantly chipped into the false floor of the passage, creating a home-made squeeze that you had to wiggle through. As the first squeeze I’ve ever done, I thought it was a testament to the conditions that you can put your body through and yet still make it out in one piece. However, the sideways crawl outwards through the West Series felt like it was not for the weak. The entire passage was covered in sharp scalloping which dug into my elbows and brought home the similarities between someone in this passage and a worm.
A few days later, Sioned and I went to explore Cullaun 1 (a cave neither of us had visited before, heeding the advice of ‘follow the streamway to not get lost’), while Ash and Dan went to survey Cullaun 0. Cave entrances so obscure that they require you to remember specific coordinates to find them isn’t a problem I’ve ever experienced before, but finding them concealed in a year’s worth of brambles and natural debris was even more challenging.
Cullaun 1 (also known as Teenagers’) was very unassuming at first, being a 4-metre deep crevice in the ground that you could potentially fall into while walking your dog, but the calcite features within were absolutely stunning. Beautiful calcite drips, caught mid-bubble like milky white bunches of grapes, hung proudly atop the walls, stretching into tree-like branches running towards the ground, round and dense near the ceiling, trunk-like near the floor. They looked like the residue of a thousand melted candles at all stages of usage, wax distorted and combined into hundreds of patterns. One wall was so covered in rich, pure calcite it looked to be blanketed in inches of snow, sparkling when it caught the light of my headtorch. Divots in the walls gave way to crystalline pools of water, which looked like windows looking into more calcite - this time forming clusters like coral along the floor of the pool.
Photo by Dan Runcan.
Something that I found particularly fascinating was the UBSS graffiti (dating back to 1951!) near the first pot with an arrow proclaiming ‘200 YARDS TO 3RD POT’.
For Ash and Dan, Cullaun 0 started with the surprise of a solar panel parked near the entrance. On further inspection, a farmer had appeared to have set up a solar-powered pump extracting water from the cave to feed his livestock. Gently moving past this entire setup, they thoroughly documented how Cullaun 0 was a series of very narrow crawls and slippery calcite walls, and I did not envy them at all. Cullaun 0 ends with a burrow up through a bush, winding up with Dan submerged in brambles.
Dan Runcan in Cullaun 0. Photo by Ash Gregg.
The penultimate trip to Doolin River Cave was possibly my favourite - I’ve never witnessed such a beautiful wide open passage and high ceilings in a cave before. After being squeezed into tight spaces for a week, it was incredibly refreshing to be able to stretch my arms out and feel the air on my fingers. Thin, wriggling cave eels, like tapeworms, could be found in the water which almost looked like a trick of my headtorch. [Editor’s note: Er, I hate to tell you this, Moon, but these were almost certainly leeches!] Ash, Sioned and Sean in the streamway spotted a beautiful peach-coloured cave fish that appeared to be almost stationary in the water. I found it absolutely fascinating. There were strong currents of clean water falling down past your head in some sections that you had to weave through, filling your ears with their sheer noise and force. I’ve also never done a through trip. There’s something magical about going into a cave one way and suddenly appearing out the other end, an especially beautiful 15-metre deep crevasse. Having the sunlight hit your face after hours of only a cold white headtorch illuminating a dim cloud of cave around you is a beautiful feeling, and laddering out of a cave is always fun.
Doolin River Cave. Photo by Ash Gregg.
Throughout the entire trip, the one thing that you get incredibly used to is deftly walking through ankle deep water, made opaque by the large quantities of peat flooding through the streamway, using all the sensitivity in your soles that your wellies allow to focus on the ground and not fall into a hole or twist your ankle on an ill-placed stone. Especially travelling past Balcombe’s Pot into the Main Drain, there are sections in the ground that just give way, though you have water to cushion your fall. Never trust Ash and Dan telling you to lead the way past this point - they are using you as a guinea pig to predict where the holes are!
Adults? Yes, of course we're adults. Why do you ask?
My absolute favourite memory was bringing the inflatable unicorn into Balcombe’s Pot and floating around on it and seeing who could stay on it the longest. On further inspection, it had a weight limit of about 40 kg, but we still managed to fit me, Sioned and Ash on at once for about ten seconds before it capsized. Whimsy does not go amiss in caving!
One of the most interesting things about Ireland, or maybe this is more a caving thing in general thing really, is the fact that you can put a random assortment of strangers (I knew Lee, but still) in a room, hanging out for most of the day, in and out of caves, and despite having very little in common on paper, it clicks and you end up gelling together well. It rained quite a lot, so we really were stuck inside together (as Ash was the only person with a car). I’ve never been in a situation where I got to know and form a connection with people in very different stages of life to me - all too often as a student you stick solidly to the student bubble, and Bristol students do have a reputation for being from an incredibly homogenous background, so I valued the opportunity to branch out and connect with others I typically wouldn’t be drawn to.
I also met and bonded with Kermit, the Coolagh River Cave surveying mascot, which I actually didn’t realise until about halfway through the first week. Until then, two grown men being incredibly attentive to this stuffed frog had been slightly baffling at first, but Lee and I grew to love and appreciate him, as everyone does. On the last day, Dan gave us some stickers, and one of them had a Kermit in a UBBS fleece, which I will treasure on my phone case forever.
If you enjoy caving and are partial to exploring and adventuring underground in general, I think you would be amiss to not go on an expedition - there’s no feeling like discovering and wiggling through an uncharted, undocumented part of nature that only you have been in.
Ireland is especially unique in that a remarkable amount of it is fairly untouched - Cullaun 1 being an excellent example, with its pristine calcite formations. It was also compelling to see and appreciate the work that goes into creating the cave surveys that we make use of doing normal tourist trips, and the many hours that Ash and Dan put it on their laptops turning their sketches into real surveys. While Lee and I tried to get some rest on the uncomfortably choppy ferry back to Wales at 11pm, Ash and Dan were still grinding away.
Sioned in Cullaun 1. Photo by Dan Runcan.
Overall, I’d say Ireland 2025 was a success! After retrospectively adding up of survey data, we were able to survey 13 cave sections encompassing 697m of cave passage, with a significant 400m of that length being crawling - a particularly significant amount being flat-out crawling. With just five of us in attendance, I would say we did a pretty good job.
Thank you to the Tratman Fund and the Oliver Lloyd Memorial Fund for making it possible for us to complete our surveying!
This summer’s Irish trip got stuck into an impressive amount of surveying, even discovering a section of new passage in the Coolagh River Cave. Moon Devendra gives their first impressions of Co Clare caves …
I’ve always thought that going caving with someone involves putting yourself in a potentially emotionally vulnerable position. As someone who finds it quite difficult to keep a cool head when presented with a challenge in a cave, I find that you develop a deeper relationship with the people you are caving with, compared to doing any other activity. Caving often involves pushing myself to (and sometimes past) my limit, but the people that accompany me truly made me feel supported and safe while trying something new, which was a really lovely feeling. An element of going to Ireland that felt particularly meaningful to me was becoming part of this ongoing 60-year project by UBSS (We first went to Co. Clare in 1948, Ed.). To be part of a tradition of the club, something bigger than myself, was incredibly enticing, and the idea felt quite special and unique - a character-building experience that I could learn and grow from.
This is why on the 24th of August, I joined Lee and Dan Runcan bundled into Ash Gregg’s car journeying together from Bristol, ready to plunge into the depths of Irish caves surveying for two weeks. We were joined by Sioned Haughton on Monday evening of the second week, and on the weekend by Sean Thompson from Belfast.
Getting to Ireland was a formidable 12-hour journey with a palatable 9.30am start. Four hours driving to Fishguard in South Wales from Bristol, then hours of pissing around on the way to Rosslare Harbour, admiring the silky turquoise depths of the Irish sea, and meeting the ferry mascot, a porpoise aptly named ‘Happy’, and then a four hour drive to Lisdoonvarna in County Clare, our base location for this trip. I wasn’t expecting to stay in an idyllic little cottage in the middle of nowhere on a caving trip, but it came as a pleasant surprise.
Left to right: Dan Runcan, Kermit, Moon and Lee.
For those not in the know, typically a survey group consists of three people, the affectionately named ‘dog’, whose sole purpose is to find and mark new stations (points of reference from which to take readings from), the person taking readings using the disto (device used to measure the distance between stations using a laser), and the person drawing up the readings into something that actually reflects the cave’s layout. For the first week, we had to split into two groups of two to survey different sections, but this is actually ideal when surveying tight passages, so it wasn’t too bad.
I’ve never done any sort of surveying, but after being taught how the disto works, a brief stint of surveying the house, and having the words ‘do not drop this into a puddle’ embossed into my mind by Ash and Dan, I felt fairly well prepared, though nothing can really prepare you for crawling through a barely person-shaped passage, face-to-welly with the people in front and behind you, marking stations in the mud with nail polish and then smearing them away during an ill-angled shuffle, mud on every surface including the disto to the point where it becomes difficult to differentiate between person and cave. Most of the surveying, thankfully, was in passages you could stoop or stand in, but the surveying past the southern branch of the West Series was certainly memorable.
Polldonough Main Entrance with a significant stream. Photo by Dan Runcan.
Even on the first day, I could never ignore the beauty of the forests in which Irish caves are situated. They truly look straight out of Irish folklore, like they should be brimming with fairies and elves. I’ve never seen woods so fairytale, blanketed in soft layers of luminescent green moss and brambles so thick that you needed an oversuit to venture past them, neatly decorated with uniform lines of wispy pine trees. The Coolagh River Cave’s main entrance was picturesque, making the perilous wade through thorns to access it more than worthwhile.
We determined if the cave was safe to venture into by observing the depth of the river flowing into the entrance - we had a reference image of a boulder directly outside the cave entrance and the degree to which it was submerged, and on wet days we’d compare the submersion of the boulder to that of the image to determine whether or not we’d be swallowed alive by the gushing streamway.
The south entrance to the Coolagh River Cave began with a lovely rusted iron ladder leading directly into a crawl through the streamway. Irish cavers had also reinforced the cave entrance with a lovely plastic drum, which made climbing in and out of the cave a breeze. The challenge for me personally began with navigating the anxiety-inducing Double Passage where a layer of rock shelf opened up in an hourglass shape to a large gap, this pattern happening in reverse to meet the true floor of the cave. The gap felt decidedly Moon-shaped, menacing and omnipresent every time I looked downwards, but caving has a beautiful way of making you face fears that you didn’t even know you had in real time, and as we went through it again and again, the distance downwards became evermore bearable.
Ash Gregg in the south entrance to Coolagh River Cave. Photo by Dan Runcan.
To get to our surveying destination, we had to trudge through a section of mud with the viscosity and texture of peanut butter, which clings to you, threatening to absorb you and drag you into its suffocating depths with an alarming amount of force, a kind of mud I’ve personally never experienced before, and I hope it subsides by next year. The passages we surveyed were remarkably dry compared to the wet sludge we’d travel through to arrive there - nice and manoeuvrable. Sean had never done any surveying before despite caving for four years, so it was really enjoyable to experience how enthusiastic he was about it. Something that's quite fun about surveying down long corridors is aligning the stations, so they can be the furthest distance apart while still being representative of the cave and its idiosyncrasies.
My absolute favourite photo from the trip was taken in this section. One of Ash standing thigh deep in a dense layer of foam coating the walls and water we waded through. It honestly felt like standing in a very cold cappuccino.
They don't normally serve this in Costa! Photo by Sean Thompson.
I found that you can make the caving (and surveying) as difficult or as easy as you’d like it to be. Feeling rather ambitious, early in the first week, Ash and I went through the West Series to survey the peculiarly named ‘Pink Panther Passage’, a section discovered by Ash after he (using a loose rock) valiantly chipped into the false floor of the passage, creating a home-made squeeze that you had to wiggle through. As the first squeeze I’ve ever done, I thought it was a testament to the conditions that you can put your body through and yet still make it out in one piece. However, the sideways crawl outwards through the West Series felt like it was not for the weak. The entire passage was covered in sharp scalloping which dug into my elbows and brought home the similarities between someone in this passage and a worm.
A few days later, Sioned and I went to explore Cullaun 1 (a cave neither of us had visited before, heeding the advice of ‘follow the streamway to not get lost’), while Ash and Dan went to survey Cullaun 0. Cave entrances so obscure that they require you to remember specific coordinates to find them isn’t a problem I’ve ever experienced before, but finding them concealed in a year’s worth of brambles and natural debris was even more challenging.
Cullaun 1 (also known as Teenagers’) was very unassuming at first, being a 4-metre deep crevice in the ground that you could potentially fall into while walking your dog, but the calcite features within were absolutely stunning. Beautiful calcite drips, caught mid-bubble like milky white bunches of grapes, hung proudly atop the walls, stretching into tree-like branches running towards the ground, round and dense near the ceiling, trunk-like near the floor. They looked like the residue of a thousand melted candles at all stages of usage, wax distorted and combined into hundreds of patterns. One wall was so covered in rich, pure calcite it looked to be blanketed in inches of snow, sparkling when it caught the light of my headtorch. Divots in the walls gave way to crystalline pools of water, which looked like windows looking into more calcite - this time forming clusters like coral along the floor of the pool.
Photo by Dan Runcan.
Something that I found particularly fascinating was the UBSS graffiti (dating back to 1951!) near the first pot with an arrow proclaiming ‘200 YARDS TO 3RD POT’.
For Ash and Dan, Cullaun 0 started with the surprise of a solar panel parked near the entrance. On further inspection, a farmer had appeared to have set up a solar-powered pump extracting water from the cave to feed his livestock. Gently moving past this entire setup, they thoroughly documented how Cullaun 0 was a series of very narrow crawls and slippery calcite walls, and I did not envy them at all. Cullaun 0 ends with a burrow up through a bush, winding up with Dan submerged in brambles.
Dan Runcan in Cullaun 0. Photo by Ash Gregg.
The penultimate trip to Doolin River Cave was possibly my favourite - I’ve never witnessed such a beautiful wide open passage and high ceilings in a cave before. After being squeezed into tight spaces for a week, it was incredibly refreshing to be able to stretch my arms out and feel the air on my fingers. Thin, wriggling cave eels, like tapeworms, could be found in the water which almost looked like a trick of my headtorch. [Editor’s note: Er, I hate to tell you this, Moon, but these were almost certainly leeches!] Ash, Sioned and Sean in the streamway spotted a beautiful peach-coloured cave fish that appeared to be almost stationary in the water. I found it absolutely fascinating. There were strong currents of clean water falling down past your head in some sections that you had to weave through, filling your ears with their sheer noise and force. I’ve also never done a through trip. There’s something magical about going into a cave one way and suddenly appearing out the other end, an especially beautiful 15-metre deep crevasse. Having the sunlight hit your face after hours of only a cold white headtorch illuminating a dim cloud of cave around you is a beautiful feeling, and laddering out of a cave is always fun.
Doolin River Cave. Photo by Ash Gregg.
Throughout the entire trip, the one thing that you get incredibly used to is deftly walking through ankle deep water, made opaque by the large quantities of peat flooding through the streamway, using all the sensitivity in your soles that your wellies allow to focus on the ground and not fall into a hole or twist your ankle on an ill-placed stone. Especially travelling past Balcombe’s Pot into the Main Drain, there are sections in the ground that just give way, though you have water to cushion your fall. Never trust Ash and Dan telling you to lead the way past this point - they are using you as a guinea pig to predict where the holes are!
Adults? Yes, of course we're adults. Why do you ask?
My absolute favourite memory was bringing the inflatable unicorn into Balcombe’s Pot and floating around on it and seeing who could stay on it the longest. On further inspection, it had a weight limit of about 40 kg, but we still managed to fit me, Sioned and Ash on at once for about ten seconds before it capsized. Whimsy does not go amiss in caving!
One of the most interesting things about Ireland, or maybe this is more a caving thing in general thing really, is the fact that you can put a random assortment of strangers (I knew Lee, but still) in a room, hanging out for most of the day, in and out of caves, and despite having very little in common on paper, it clicks and you end up gelling together well. It rained quite a lot, so we really were stuck inside together (as Ash was the only person with a car). I’ve never been in a situation where I got to know and form a connection with people in very different stages of life to me - all too often as a student you stick solidly to the student bubble, and Bristol students do have a reputation for being from an incredibly homogenous background, so I valued the opportunity to branch out and connect with others I typically wouldn’t be drawn to.
I also met and bonded with Kermit, the Coolagh River Cave surveying mascot, which I actually didn’t realise until about halfway through the first week. Until then, two grown men being incredibly attentive to this stuffed frog had been slightly baffling at first, but Lee and I grew to love and appreciate him, as everyone does. On the last day, Dan gave us some stickers, and one of them had a Kermit in a UBBS fleece, which I will treasure on my phone case forever.
If you enjoy caving and are partial to exploring and adventuring underground in general, I think you would be amiss to not go on an expedition - there’s no feeling like discovering and wiggling through an uncharted, undocumented part of nature that only you have been in.
Ireland is especially unique in that a remarkable amount of it is fairly untouched - Cullaun 1 being an excellent example, with its pristine calcite formations. It was also compelling to see and appreciate the work that goes into creating the cave surveys that we make use of doing normal tourist trips, and the many hours that Ash and Dan put it on their laptops turning their sketches into real surveys. While Lee and I tried to get some rest on the uncomfortably choppy ferry back to Wales at 11pm, Ash and Dan were still grinding away.
Sioned in Cullaun 1. Photo by Dan Runcan. Overall, I’d say Ireland 2025 was a success! After retrospectively adding up of survey data, we were able to survey 13 cave sections encompassing 697m of cave passage, with a significant 400m of that length being crawling - a particularly significant amount being flat-out crawling. With just five of us in attendance, I would say we did a pretty good job.
Thank you to the Tratman Fund and the Oliver Lloyd Memorial Fund for making it possible for us to complete our surveying!
Moon Devendra
IRELAND 2025 - A PICTORIAL HISTORY
It's a well known saying that a picture paints a thousand words, so here the story of the 2025 trip to Co Clare told in a series of drawings from this year's log.
Climbing in Coolagh.
Crawling and surveying in Coolagh.
Moon in a squeeze.
Combined tactics on a climb.
Rainy day in Co Clare
Blacksmith in Craggaunowen History Park
Dan drawing up the survey.
And the end result of everyone's labours ...
It's a well known saying that a picture paints a thousand words, so here the story of the 2025 trip to Co Clare told in a series of drawings from this year's log.
Climbing in Coolagh.
Crawling and surveying in Coolagh.
Moon in a squeeze.
Combined tactics on a climb.
Rainy day in Co Clare
Blacksmith in Craggaunowen History Park
Dan drawing up the survey.
And the end result of everyone's labours ...
Extracts from the UBSS Logbook.
UBSS AT BRISTOL'S BRILLIANT ARCHAEOLOGY
When UBSS plays silly buggers, we do it in style, as Linda Wilson demonstrates in the story of the efforts made for Bristol City Museum's annual Festival of Archaeology held at Blaise Castle.
I've always felt guilty that I've never been around when Kate Iles from Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery has been drumming up support for the annual Bristol's Brilliant Archaeology Festival held on the Blaise Castle Estate. Kate has been a huge help and support to the society as museum curator as she's been acting as our Museum Mentor under the Arts Council Accreditation scheme, but I've always either been in France or othrwise occupied on the relevant weekend for the last yew years, but this year, I had no excuse. I was in the right country for once and the calendar was looking suspiciously clear. So I took a deep breath and committed to running a stall this year.
Apart from having a vague idea of building a cardboard cave, naturally we left prepartions very much to the last minute in best UBSS tradition. The only thing I organised in advance was the 3D printing of some replica Bronze Age arrowheads by my nephew-in-law Simon and UBSS member Chris Pepper. I also got Simon working on some 3D printed animal skulls to stand in for a handling collection. He threw himself into the spirit of things and was soon turning out life sized skulls for fox, dog, wolf, deer and a bear jaw. With the weekend was drawing ever nearer, a large box arived in the post for me containing various goodies. They were all great, but as I was mainly stuck dog-sitting our greyhound who's recovering with a broken leg, I went down with a bad case of mission cream and started to handpaint all the replica flints to look more like the real thing. Three hundred handpainted arrowheads later. I was quite pleased with myself!
We did get some adults underground! Jan Walker (left) showing a member of the blic our dig. The broken stal came from Tony Boycott's rock collection from one of his many Mendip digs.
Having abandoned the cardboard cave idea as being too impractical, I settled for buying six metres of black cloth really cheaply at The Range. We were all set! Then the weather forecast threw a spanner in the works and the night before, we were relocated into the main house as the anticipated high winds meant the promised gazebos outside had to be scrapped. To her credit, Kate didn't quail at my idea of recreating an archaeological dig in a large bucket of sand salted with dozens of replica flints for kids (and adults) to excavate.
Saturday 13th September dawned somewhat fairer than anticipated and David Hardwick turned up bright and early at my house and we transferred a vast amount of kit from the Aladdin's cave of the back of David's car into mine including umpteen helmets (and two dinky little ones for kids) various lights, a table, folding chairs, the contents of his grandkid's sandpit, buckets etc etc. This was augmented my all the stuff I'd got together and off we went while Jan Walker headed off to Clifton to pick up Joshitha Shivkumar.
We were sharing a room with Cotswold Archaeology and another group, and while they were setting up their stalls and behaving like normal adults, we set up a couple of tables in a corner, draped them with acres of black cloth and then dropped to the floor like perfectly normal cavers and started to squeeze into the cave under the low cross-bar of the first table, then wriggle through a section of 'passage', out of the next 'squeeze', round a corner and into the 'dig chamber'. Having proved the concept to our total satisfaction, we briefly reverted to adulthood and laid out a load of skulls in preparation for a guess-the-animal game as well as festooning another table with loads of caving helmets and photos that Joshitha had printed, so we could show people what caving is all about.
Marchello at our post excavation processing station. Photo by his mum, Charlotte Harman.
As well as the dig inside the cave, we had a 'surface station' set up whether any kids and adults who didn't want to wriggle around on the floor could sit and dig with a trowel and brushers in another sandpit. At that point, we realised that we'd forgotten to bring a dustpan and brush so an SOS went out to Graham who was coming along later with one of our neighbours.
The Festival opened to the public at 11am and amazing, we were ready in good time, with Chris Pepper on hand to help as well. People started to wander through the room and were promptly pounced on and dragged to our stand. We found the majority of youngsters were very enthusiastic about putting on a helmet and wriggling through the cave to the dig. They were even more enthusiastic to learn that they could keep some of their finds! The arrowheads were augmented by some fragments of pottery and clay pipe courtesy of some material brought along by David from Gloucester Museum that had been de-accessioned as lacking in provenance etc and rather than being being disposed of, going for outreach was as good a fate as any.
While their little darlings were crawling through the cave and playing in the sandpit, parents could occupy themselves digging outside, or playing the animal guessing game were they had to put a picture of the animal on top of the correct skull. Thanks to a donation of many, many stickers from Kents Cavern, we were able to 'badge' anyone who'd joined in the fun. The stickers, the arrowheads and the bits of real archaeology proved a big hit, as did the cave! At a rough count, we had between 150 - 200 people (mostly children) through the cave, with more interacting with us on the stall and learning about caving and cave archaeology.
We failed to persuade the Lord Mayor to try the cave, but he proved to have a surprising connection to caving in that his granddad was friends with Lionel of Lionel's Hole fame!
How's this for posh caving gear? Yes, even the Lord Mayor paid us a visit.
Joshitha, Jan, David, Chris and I were on the go solidly from arrival to close of play at 4pm, with only short breaks so we could each have a look around the rest of the fair. There were dozens of fascinating stalls, with loads of re-enactors from various periods, as well as archery, pottery and demonstrations of ancient crafts. I was absolutely enthralled by the man dressed in Saxon clothes who was embossing thin copper sheet from ornately carved handmade dies. I absolutely fell in love with his stuff and bartered for a few of his demonstration pieces for myself as he was turning them out in vast numbers.
By 6pm we were all knackered, but it really had been a brilliant day, and I think we'd all be up for doing it again!
In total, the Festival had 1145 visitors, with 107 stall holders/re-enactors!
With grateful thanks to everyone who helped, in particular Joshitha Shivkumar, David Hardwick, Jan Walker, Chis Pepper and Simon Finnigan.
When UBSS plays silly buggers, we do it in style, as Linda Wilson demonstrates in the story of the efforts made for Bristol City Museum's annual Festival of Archaeology held at Blaise Castle.
I've always felt guilty that I've never been around when Kate Iles from Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery has been drumming up support for the annual Bristol's Brilliant Archaeology Festival held on the Blaise Castle Estate. Kate has been a huge help and support to the society as museum curator as she's been acting as our Museum Mentor under the Arts Council Accreditation scheme, but I've always either been in France or othrwise occupied on the relevant weekend for the last yew years, but this year, I had no excuse. I was in the right country for once and the calendar was looking suspiciously clear. So I took a deep breath and committed to running a stall this year.
Apart from having a vague idea of building a cardboard cave, naturally we left prepartions very much to the last minute in best UBSS tradition. The only thing I organised in advance was the 3D printing of some replica Bronze Age arrowheads by my nephew-in-law Simon and UBSS member Chris Pepper. I also got Simon working on some 3D printed animal skulls to stand in for a handling collection. He threw himself into the spirit of things and was soon turning out life sized skulls for fox, dog, wolf, deer and a bear jaw. With the weekend was drawing ever nearer, a large box arived in the post for me containing various goodies. They were all great, but as I was mainly stuck dog-sitting our greyhound who's recovering with a broken leg, I went down with a bad case of mission cream and started to handpaint all the replica flints to look more like the real thing. Three hundred handpainted arrowheads later. I was quite pleased with myself!
We did get some adults underground! Jan Walker (left) showing a member of the blic our dig. The broken stal came from Tony Boycott's rock collection from one of his many Mendip digs.
Having abandoned the cardboard cave idea as being too impractical, I settled for buying six metres of black cloth really cheaply at The Range. We were all set! Then the weather forecast threw a spanner in the works and the night before, we were relocated into the main house as the anticipated high winds meant the promised gazebos outside had to be scrapped. To her credit, Kate didn't quail at my idea of recreating an archaeological dig in a large bucket of sand salted with dozens of replica flints for kids (and adults) to excavate.
Saturday 13th September dawned somewhat fairer than anticipated and David Hardwick turned up bright and early at my house and we transferred a vast amount of kit from the Aladdin's cave of the back of David's car into mine including umpteen helmets (and two dinky little ones for kids) various lights, a table, folding chairs, the contents of his grandkid's sandpit, buckets etc etc. This was augmented my all the stuff I'd got together and off we went while Jan Walker headed off to Clifton to pick up Joshitha Shivkumar.
We were sharing a room with Cotswold Archaeology and another group, and while they were setting up their stalls and behaving like normal adults, we set up a couple of tables in a corner, draped them with acres of black cloth and then dropped to the floor like perfectly normal cavers and started to squeeze into the cave under the low cross-bar of the first table, then wriggle through a section of 'passage', out of the next 'squeeze', round a corner and into the 'dig chamber'. Having proved the concept to our total satisfaction, we briefly reverted to adulthood and laid out a load of skulls in preparation for a guess-the-animal game as well as festooning another table with loads of caving helmets and photos that Joshitha had printed, so we could show people what caving is all about.
Marchello at our post excavation processing station. Photo by his mum, Charlotte Harman.
As well as the dig inside the cave, we had a 'surface station' set up whether any kids and adults who didn't want to wriggle around on the floor could sit and dig with a trowel and brushers in another sandpit. At that point, we realised that we'd forgotten to bring a dustpan and brush so an SOS went out to Graham who was coming along later with one of our neighbours.
The Festival opened to the public at 11am and amazing, we were ready in good time, with Chris Pepper on hand to help as well. People started to wander through the room and were promptly pounced on and dragged to our stand. We found the majority of youngsters were very enthusiastic about putting on a helmet and wriggling through the cave to the dig. They were even more enthusiastic to learn that they could keep some of their finds! The arrowheads were augmented by some fragments of pottery and clay pipe courtesy of some material brought along by David from Gloucester Museum that had been de-accessioned as lacking in provenance etc and rather than being being disposed of, going for outreach was as good a fate as any.
While their little darlings were crawling through the cave and playing in the sandpit, parents could occupy themselves digging outside, or playing the animal guessing game were they had to put a picture of the animal on top of the correct skull. Thanks to a donation of many, many stickers from Kents Cavern, we were able to 'badge' anyone who'd joined in the fun. The stickers, the arrowheads and the bits of real archaeology proved a big hit, as did the cave! At a rough count, we had between 150 - 200 people (mostly children) through the cave, with more interacting with us on the stall and learning about caving and cave archaeology.
We failed to persuade the Lord Mayor to try the cave, but he proved to have a surprising connection to caving in that his granddad was friends with Lionel of Lionel's Hole fame!
How's this for posh caving gear? Yes, even the Lord Mayor paid us a visit.
Joshitha, Jan, David, Chris and I were on the go solidly from arrival to close of play at 4pm, with only short breaks so we could each have a look around the rest of the fair. There were dozens of fascinating stalls, with loads of re-enactors from various periods, as well as archery, pottery and demonstrations of ancient crafts. I was absolutely enthralled by the man dressed in Saxon clothes who was embossing thin copper sheet from ornately carved handmade dies. I absolutely fell in love with his stuff and bartered for a few of his demonstration pieces for myself as he was turning them out in vast numbers.
By 6pm we were all knackered, but it really had been a brilliant day, and I think we'd all be up for doing it again!
In total, the Festival had 1145 visitors, with 107 stall holders/re-enactors!
With grateful thanks to everyone who helped, in particular Joshitha Shivkumar, David Hardwick, Jan Walker, Chis Pepper and Simon Finnigan.
Linda Wilson
KERMIT READ TO THE END, DID YOU?
For all our readers both new and old, this is your chance to let us know that you reached the end of this month's caving epic, akin to wriggling all the way to the end of a particularly squalid section of passage and then boasting to your mates that you did it! For all our new student readers, this is your chance to win a prize! Just drop us a line using the link at the end and say hello! And we'll hand over a prize of a UBSS neck buff to you as a reward for your labours!
- Did somebody say cheese? [Graham Mullan]
- Thanks again for an interesting newsletter. [Hans Friederich]
- I'm tittering at the end of the Belgian epic. Still disappointed you didn't get the "is it because I iz Belgian?" line into it somewhere! Great accounts and photos from all the summer trips. And yay for the flashy website updates - excellent resources saved. [Sharon Wheeler and the faintly impressed FT Bear]
- Great newsletter, nearly time for sump 12 I think ;) [Ben Morgan]
- Super newsletter, fab trips (and photos)! I adored the Sofirn and Cheese Ocelot scene, but I have to admit I think I’ve gone right off cheese for the moment after reading that story. [Jan Walker]
Kermit! Congratulations on finding new passage in Co Clare!
THE END
For all our readers both new and old, this is your chance to let us know that you reached the end of this month's caving epic, akin to wriggling all the way to the end of a particularly squalid section of passage and then boasting to your mates that you did it! For all our new student readers, this is your chance to win a prize! Just drop us a line using the link at the end and say hello! And we'll hand over a prize of a UBSS neck buff to you as a reward for your labours!
- Did somebody say cheese? [Graham Mullan]
- Thanks again for an interesting newsletter. [Hans Friederich]
- I'm tittering at the end of the Belgian epic. Still disappointed you didn't get the "is it because I iz Belgian?" line into it somewhere! Great accounts and photos from all the summer trips. And yay for the flashy website updates - excellent resources saved. [Sharon Wheeler and the faintly impressed FT Bear]
- Great newsletter, nearly time for sump 12 I think ;) [Ben Morgan]
- Super newsletter, fab trips (and photos)! I adored the Sofirn and Cheese Ocelot scene, but I have to admit I think I’ve gone right off cheese for the moment after reading that story. [Jan Walker]
Kermit! Congratulations on finding new passage in Co Clare!
THE END