An account is given of the discovery and exploration of Poll na gCéim, currently the second deepest cave in Ireland. It is shown to have reached this depth by having utilised a fault to pass from the upper Brigantian Limestone to the Asbian Limestone beneath. It is the first recorded active stream cave in this particular formation.

The systematic collection of biological specimens from British caves began in the 1930s, and increased in scope through the 1940s and 1950s. The results appeared as supplements or records of the Cave Research Group of Great Britain between 1955 and 1965, covering the years 1938 to 1963. However, no index was produced for sitenames or taxonomic groups (or non-cave sites) located within this primary source. This index is intended to overcome that omission, and to explain some of the changes in nomenclature that have occurred in the intervening years.

The tragic death of Joseph Plumley in 1875, not 1874 as often recorded, at the site of a newly discovered cave in Burrington Combe is well known. This paper examines contemporary newspaper reports recorded here for the first time in speleological literature. Important detail in these new references conflicts with later accounts which were largely based either upon the eye-witness note in a pamphlet published privately by Evan Llewellyn in 1911 or local hearsay of the 1920’s. The possibility of an active stream cave, low in Burrington Combe, may offer the caver an important cave system as yet unexplored in an area where caver interest has been reawakened by the discoveries at Lionel’s Hole and Pierre’s Pot.

In 1994, a second season of survey and trial excavation was conducted in caves and rockshelters in the Wye Valley gorge, near Monmouth, Gwent. This is part of a five-year project focusing on the relationship between the functional uses of caves and their topographic location in the landscape. In addition to continuing work at Madawg Shelter, new sites were surveyed in the Symonds Yat East area and on Little Doward Hill. Finds of final Palaeolithic, later Mesolithic and Bronze Age type are reported on.