The cavers peer into their hands to check the bright discs of yellow light that show their headlamp beams are switched on. These twentysomething novices then follow their instructor into Lower Long Churn, a classic caving trip in the Three Peaks country of Whernside, Ingleborough and Penyghent.
If only I could follow suit. But I am still recovering from my hip revision procedure of two years ago. I can at least use my trekking poles to enjoy the limestone countryside, though. The sedimentary rock hereabouts is riddled with caves etched over aeons by acidic rainwater running into the ground and attacking the fissures and cracks below the turf where aromatic wild thyme grows – and where the cavers have disappeared.
Nearby a Swaledale sheep stamps a foot, bleats and turns away when it sees I have no dog. I have arrived from Selside – a hamlet midway between Horton-in-Ribblesdale and Ribblehead train stations on the mountainous Settle-Carlisle line. Having paid £1 to the farmer, I take the lane leading to Alum Pot (an open shaft a good 100 metres deep). It is near here that the young potholers re-emerge into sunlight, blinking like startled moles and buzzing with the marvels they had seen. Blind shrimps. Stalactites and stalagmites, some of them joined into pillars. Lower Long Churn is “cool”, announces one bearded novice, but it was a shame they had to turn back. The instructor agrees. But the cave eventually drops sheer into Alum Pot.
“The cave was quite enough,” says a young woman, her boilersuit sodden after a fall into the Double Shuffle Pool. Everyone laughs. They had all found it tricky climbing underground, and she wasn’t the only one to get wet. Posting themselves down the Letter Box had been no picnic, either.
Now they disappear under a low roof, into the adjacent entrance of Upper Long Churn. This by way of contrast is a “through” trip in the opposite direction, emerging on moorland several hundred metres away.
When they return to daylight, the talk is all of crawling through oxbows and wading canals. “That waterfall above Dr Bannister’s Hand Basin was worst,” says someone. “It was like a tap left running full on.”
