24

Going Underground

THERE ARE TOO many mountains in the world to climb in a single lifetime. There are even too many in the UK for most. Of those who seek to climb Scotland’s 282 Munros, only a small minority manage to bag the whole lot.

For most of us, time away from the 9–5 is limited. Weekends and holidays are precious. Choices have to be made. That’s where a guidebook comes in. I want to know the best places to go.

On the other hand, I love to explore. I envy the pioneers of old, for whom every trip into the mountains broke new ground in a way that’s no longer possible today. Roads, upland vehicle tracks, man-made paths, fences, pylons, wind farms, crowds… even without a guidebook, it’s hardly undiscovered country.

There are still places in the UK, especially in Scotland, where you can get ‘off the beaten track’ and discover secret places you’re sure no one has visited before. But there’s only one place left to do real exploration, where you have no idea what to expect or what lies around the next corner, and that’s underground. This holds true even if you use a guidebook, because cave interiors are generally too dark and complex to describe in useful detail.

It was only a few years ago, in 2011, that caves in Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire were linked to form England’s longest system. At the time of writing, it has no less than 55 miles of passages, with further extensions probable in the future. But how many people have even heard of the Three Counties System?

The longest cave in Wales is the 43-miles-long Ogof Draenen, while Ireland’s longest is the ten-miles-long Pollnagollum–Poulelva cave in County Clare. Plenty of room for exploration there. Compared to such underground riches, Scotland is hard done by. The longest Scottish cave is the Uamh an Claonaite in the Northern Highlands, where years of sump diving have so far yielded only two miles of hard-won passage.

The most well-known caves in Scotland are sea caves such as Smoo Cave on the north coast and Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa. Like most caves of their ilk, they have little length beyond their huge entrances. Long passages are found only in extensive beds of limestone, which Scotland conspicuously lacks. The limestone caves that do exist are characterised by hard-to-find entrances backed by cramped crawl ways. They provide energetic sport.

Exploring such hidey-holes demands of the caver the flexibility of a contortionist and the stickability of a mud wrestler. I lack both accomplishments but am thankfully unafflicted by what for many is a speleological deal breaker: claustrophobia. To me, the blackness beyond the reach of the torch beam gives a sense of limitless space, because there is no end to what you can see. Outside that beam of light might as well be infinity.

Despite my limitations, my desire for exploration ensured that it was only a matter of time before I was lured underground. In Kingston Master Cave in the Yorkshire Dales, a short ladder pitch led to a large stream passage along which we splashed like carefree children. In Bruntscar Cave, a roomy passage led to waterfalls whose negotiation was more fun than any waterpark feature.

But increasingly, as though egged on by some devilish imp perched on my shoulder, I was strangely drawn to the more esoteric pleasures of the awkward, unsung caves of Scotland. Thrutching one’s way through their confined spaces was never going to be easy, but it was also never going to be less than interesting. Given my penchant for idiosyncratic adventure, I should perhaps have foreseen that it would land me in a whole new set of predicaments for which I was singularly ill prepared.

A roomy section of the Cave of the Knives

The Uamh an Sgeinne (Cave of the Knives) is a typically constricted Skye cave. The entrance is a small letterbox opening in an inconspicuous rock outcrop hidden on a remote hillside. Behind the entrance, a short tube descends to a prolonged crawl whose crux is a jack-knifing squeeze around an awkward stal column.

Not far beyond here, Jim and I turned back when we reached a tight tube half-filled with water. It was his first trip underground and, for some reason, despite his prior enthusiasm, the actuality was failing to fill him with exploratory zeal. His conviction that this was an aberrant and undignified pursuit for an adult was reinforced by an unfortunate incident that he later confessed had him wondering whether he would ever see daylight again.

Both our head torches went out.

At the same time.

With no backup (a lesson well and truly learned), we found ourselves in complete darkness, and I do mean complete. Underground darkness isn’t like nighttime darkness. In the blackness of a cave, you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. Finding a way out of a complex cave in such circumstances is almost impossible. All rocks, nooks and crannies feel the same. Working your way around a perimeter, as you might to find the door in a dark room, won’t work because you’ll most likely miss the one small hole that may be the sole key to the exit route. And you’ll soon lose your bearings anyway.

While Jim attempted to quell the rising panic that his voice betrayed, I set my mind to solving the problem. Surely not both light bulbs and both sets of batteries could have failed at the same time. Carefully, very carefully, extremely carefully, I dismantled both torches on my lap. I placed each separate item in a precise location, so that I could find it again by touch alone, and swapped the batteries. The possibility of a dropped battery was an eventuality I refused to contemplate.

At length, I managed to piece together a single operational torch that re-illuminated both our exit route and Jim’s distress. I handed him the torch for reassurance and he scampered off like a rat, leaving me in his wake. I had to call him back before he was out of earshot.

Jim never ventured down a cave again, but the desire to see around the next corner has led me back down into that underground world of darkness again and again. Usually, there has been nothing around the next corner except another corner… but who knows what may lie around that? There may be a stream, a waterfall, a large cavern or a beautiful stal formation. And once, just once, there was a new passage that no one had noticed before…