Crack Pot Cave

Today was to be a short trip as we planned a visit to Crack Pot Cave. After driving along a mostly single track road to Summer Lodge Farm, we followed the farmer's request and parked Waggy's car and my X-Trail just beyond the gate on the grass next to the drystone-wall. Brian was allowed to park on any empty space in front of the farm buildings.

The nearby river was running quite high presumably from the recent snow melt and we walked along the squelchy ground to the small side valley where the water from Crack Pot Cave resurgence was flowing down to join the main river below.

We scrambled over small rocks to reach the obvious main entrance to the cave but found that it was blocked due to a rock fall.

This meant we had to use the alternative small entrance leading to Knee Wrecker crawl which was very close to the main entrance.

My knees were painful from yesterday's trip and after finding the crawl slow-going and not making my knees feel any better, I stopped to let Waggy and Brian past ad they were behind me. I then turned around and after having a quick look at the end of a short passage at a junction, which was obviously near the surface as there were small plat roots, dead insects and a spider there, I headed back to the entrance.

I followed a narrow path which led past the entrance to the ground higher up and above the cave entrances just to see what was there (not a lot as it turned out) and then returned to the car.

It was new raining and I was glad that the tailgate of the car provided good shelter and fortuitously, the rain was being blow from the front of the car towards the back.

After getting changed, I waited in the car for about 20 minutes and Karen and Keith arrived after having seen most of the cave,

They also got changed and I then tried to drive off the grass and back onto the track but the ground was too soft to drive up the incline as the ground was sloping back down towards the gate. So I waited for the others so that I could reverse back down and then onto the track.

Not long after, the rest arrived and again, once they had got changed, Waggy tried to drive off the grass onto the track, Driving forward was not surprisingly found to be not on, but when he tried to reverse, as the car was tight up against the wall, there wasn't enough room to swing the rear of the car away to get onto the track and Waggy found that the right-hand rear corner of his car was now up against the wall. So he could now neither move forwards or backwards!

Phil and I tried to push Waggy's car from the rear as he tried again to get off the grass but this was hopeless. We tried putting a sheet of corrugated iron and then one of his car mats under the front wheels, but this did nothing to help.

Finally we tied a piece of rope from Waggy's car onto my car's rear tow point so that I could help drag his car back onto the track but I thought this would probably fail as even on the trick, conditions were quite slippery. But it was worth a go anyway.

Luckily it worked and we soon had both cars back onto the track and we were able to reverse back down through the gate and turn around using the space in front of the farm buildings.

We all reunited at the layby on the main road where we had left the remaining cars in our party and headed for home.