Paul Lydon: Eglwys Faen

Karen drove the two of us to Whitewalls Cottage in Llangattock, belonging to the Chelsea Speleological Society. We arrived at around 22:00 and found Phil Wall and Jason Smith who had arrived earlier and were waiting outside as the hut was locked up and empty and I had brought the key.
We were up at 08:00 in the morning to cook breakfast and waited until Keith and Alice Anderson arrived.
The plan was for a leisurely trip into Agen Allwedd: we had the required permit and key. One advantage of going caving here was that we could change indoors in the hut and walk to the cave and that is what we did.
We arrived at the the small entrance to Agen Allwedd at the foot of a small limestone cliff and I got the key out and found it didn't fit the damn lock! It was a completely different sort of key to the type that fitted the lock and I couldn't understand what had gone wrong.
Rapidly we had to change to “Plan B”. We had passed another cave on the way, Eglwys Faen, but it is a relatively small cave, much, much smaller than Agen Allwedd – but there is no locked gate. At least we could go caving!
So, off we trooped back along the old tramway, back the way we had walked earlier and then walked up a short path to the large main entrance to Eglwys Faen and into the large main chamber.
From there we followed a flat-out crawl with a good draught until we met a squeeze which the others soon popped through. I found it a bit tighter and with a pulled muscle in my lower back, a memory of last week's trip underground, I didn't want to aggravate the injury so I left the others to it and went exploring another passage which involved a thorough soaking as I crawled through a pool of water with a low airspace.
I eventually popped out through a smaller alternative entrance and waited for a while to see if the others would arrive soon. As there had been since the earlier hours of the morning, yet another shower swept through blown by the strong wind and I stood in the shelter of a section of crag near the entrance.
As I waited, a group of kids dressed in caving gear came past with some adult cavers heading for Eglwys Faen, which is very popular with beginners.
I decided to head back to Whitewalls and get changed and wait there for the others. It was very windy with very string gusts but at least the showers held off until I was back indoors.
After I was changed out of caving gear I went to see what was going on with the permits and keys and why the key didn't fit the padlock earlier.
As well as a jiffy envelope containing paperwork about the hut, including the key which was taped to one of the pieces of paper. We also had an envelope with the permits for Agen Allwedd and also Ogof Draenen and when I opened it earlie, a key fell out. “Aha!”, I thought, “the key for Aggie.”

Unfortunately, this was actually the key for Ogof Draenan... the key for Aggie was again taped to a second piece of paper besides the permit which was folded in half and half again – and it also had the key taped to it! D'oh!