THE LINK-UP SURVEY

WINTER VENTURES

On December 17th after a week's frost and snow, we set off again for the Promised Land. Although the Craven skies were overcast, the distant view was one of astonishing clarity, every detail of farm and field standing out against the snows. From the fell road there was a magnificent prospect of the whole range of Lakeland hills brilliantly sun-lit and hanging like a Himalayan backcloth above the darker foreground.

When the underground parties had gone down (Cornes, Taylor, Gemmell, Bliss and Sykes), Aspin and Leyland walked up the gill to the Borehole. There was much snow and ice, but little water. We used icicles to dig out fluorescein from the sticky mass in the tin, and soon had a fine green stream running down the Borehole. To this we added a Drain-testing cartridge, supposed to give off a 'very powerful odour'. It certainly did ! We left hurriedly, going for a walk across the fell before returning to the fireside at Bullpot.

The others did not come back until seven. They were very pleased with themselves, but most displeased with Aspin and Leyland who had caused them to crawl through green pools and smell abominable smells of phosphine, etc. It appeared that dye had taken about an hour to reach the main drain at Holbeck Junction via this 'Green and Smelly Passage'. They spoke also of an adjoining waterfall passage again 'around a quarter of a mile long' which they thought must lead towards Boundary Pot. They surveyed both these passages. It was interesting to find that the smell had taken another route, reaching the passage some distance from the green inlet. We were very impressed by the possibilities of this method of detecting high-level connections.

From this time on, we spent many happy hours working out the best way in which we could colour the surface sinks in order to label underground streams entering the main drain. Fragments of surveys, knowledge of water flow, intuition, and the foibles of the parties going underground, all these things controlled the amount and the time at which dyestuffs, mainly fluorescein, were to be put into sinks. The underground observers derived no greater interest from the experiments than those on the surface who put in the dye, and waited in the farm to hear what had been seen. Negative results were not without interest, and led to beer-wetted fingers drawing many a plan on tap-room tables, but in the end only positive observations were finally accepted.

Because of Christmas festivities and foul weather, no more work was done until January 28th when Bradshaw and Myers went down after dumping an ounce of fluorescein into the Corner Sink. They found the green water at the junction just below the ladder in Pierce's Passage. Upstream in Trident Passage, there was a beautifully decorated, almost dry, rift section. Soon a flat roof came down to about 8ft above them. Roof, walls and floor were practically covered with pure white dripstone straw stalactities, anemolites, and calcite cascades. One straw, a little knobbly it must be admitted, was 4ft 3ins long. A less ornamented section led to a small Y-chamber from which they dropped back into the green water. They were again in a high rift. The stream passage ran on ahead in the line of a calcite vein. In a terminal expansion called White-line Chamber, this vein ran 25ft upwards to the lip of a green waterfall with more-than-man-sized passage above it. "One day we must deal with Swindon Hole !" they said. Going down to Eureka Junction, they re-entered the Wretched Rabbit Passage. At its head, the expert said that the 'rabbit' was obviously a hare. Climbing up nearly 70ft to a spot near a bedding-plane stream which could not quite be reached, Bradshaw found bits of timber and was sure he could not be far from the Slit Sinks on the true right bank of Ease Gill below the Borehole. But he did not bring back a survey.

Only a small party crossed over to Ease Gill on February 11th, for measles had struck at our head surveyor's family. To celebrate the return of George Thackray to the Promised Land, he and Cornes went off with Leyland up Thackray's Passage (discovered in 1948) in the hope of forcing the final chokes, while Bradshaw and Ashworth (the Green Man) at last began the survey of Wretched Rabbit Passage. Up in the gill, Aspin and Bliss poured dyestuffs down various apertures and puffed smoke down the Slit Sinks, more to their own amusement than anyone else's because no-one below saw a thing. Further down the valley they became interested in the Blind Pot just around the corner from the kidney-shaped pool of Cow Dub. The fill in this pot seemed to have settled during the winter. Water forced up through the boulders ran away again into a bedding plane. A little digging sufficed to lower the level of Cow Dub round the corner by about eighteen inches, and with the ear of faith they could then hear water falling down a pitch beyond the outflow. Could these waters go as far as Butterfield's passage in Oxford Pot? Or did they enter some new system as yet unknown?

It was March 4th before the Ford next ground its way up Casterton Fell. In the meantime the snows had again descended and the subsequent floods scoured Ease Gill bed of all but its largest stones. Today the sun was shining. The paired plovers had returned to Bullpot farm. They wheeled and dipped crazily above the rushy pasture where presently they would be nesting, their sudden cry mingling with that of the curlews, also back from the sea's edge. In Ease Gill we sat in the sunshine, enjoying the first good weather for months. Eventually we persuaded Gemmell, Dunnington and Bliss to go underground. The rest of us (Aspin, Bradshaw and Ashworth) dug in Blind Pot and hammered away at the entrance to the Slit Sinks. We put dye down both these places, and in Gelder Hole too. Long after sundown, the potholers came back to the farm bringing interesting news of the colour testing. The Rhodamine put into Blind Pot had not been found in Oxford Pot, but the colour from Gelder Hole had reappeared in the Showerbath passage, much to everyone's surprise. The Slit Sinks colour had not been seen, although the party had spent a long time in Wretched Rabbit Passage. To scotch any further argument, they had brought out.... a fox's skull ! So much for the expert who had pronounced the skeleton to be that of a hare ! Do hares have tails a foot long ? While Gemmell and Dunnington were finishing off the survey of this passage, Bliss had climbed up about 20ft at the beginning of the terminal rift. At about 50ft along this narrow passage, he had chimneyed up to an enormously wide bedding plane between 9ins and 18ins high. Here there was a deafening roar from some nearby but inaccessible waterfall, with gusts of wind carrying spray towards him. We were all late and the drive home was more than usually tedious because of thick fog walls beside the Wharfe at Ilkley.