Into the abyss: Stretching over three counties and 70 miles, inside Britain's vast and newly pioneered cave system



There are few untrodden places left on the surface of the planet but under our feet lies a network of caves that has never been explored. Pitch dark and perilous, Britain's largest tunnel system stretches beneath three counties and for decades cavers have only dreamed of discovering a link between them. Until now...

Cavers Tim Allen (left) and Mark Wright moving through climbs in the soaking Lost John's Cave

I'm plastered from head to foot in brown, glutinous mud. It's in my hair, it encrusts my ears and eyebrows, and the fluorescent blue of my waterproof nylon oversuit is invisible. I can also barely move. I'm lying on my side in a tiny limestone tunnel, trying to wriggle steeply upwards into a space that's marginally wider. First I have to negotiate a vice-like constriction in the rock.

I manage to get an arm through, then my head and a shoulder. I scrabble against the walls with my Wellingtons, searching blindly for a foothold to push against. At last I find some kind of protuberance and heave: first the other shoulder, then my chest and hips. I've managed to judge the angle right: at 6ft 3in with the build of a one-time rugby player, I've not got the ideal physique for this game but this time I haven't got stuck.



The way ahead, another hole slanting upwards, is almost entirely blocked by my guide, Tim Allen. But I can see through a slit past his wedged bottom to what looks like a black, empty space. There's a bit of an echo and blowing against our muddy faces an unmistakeable chilly draught.



'This is the end - for now,' Tim says. 'To get through the next bit we'll have to get rid of two or three of these boulders here on the right. We'll use some cement and a length of scaffolding to make sure what's left doesn't collapse.'

Eons ago, the passage, eroded by flowing water, would have been spacious, but somewhere in the mists of geological time the roof fell in, blocking it with boulders and mud. The draught suggests that somewhere ahead is more open cave. Meanwhile, excavating a route to get there feels like being a beetle in a giant bowl of sugarlumps.



Tim Allen ascending a shaft in Lost John's Cave

That enticing void that Tim can't quite yet squeeze into represents a frontier of exploration. But the hills above us aren't some little-known range in Antarctica; they are the boggy, heather-clad Pennines. As the crow flies - or in this case, crawls - we're just 16 miles from Kendal in Cumbria.

'There are now, alas, few untrodden places on the surface of the earth,' wrote Arthur Gemmell and Jack Myers in their 1952 classic book about Pennine caving, Underground Adventure.



'But there is still the world below... vast underground galleries and halls which no human being has yet seen. True, they are not to be easily found, and to penetrate these last secret strongholds may well test the explorer's ingenuity and physical powers to the utmost. But who would have it otherwise?'

On another trip the previous day, Tim recalled the dangers: 'There was a rockfall here once and someone's pelvis got crushed. I think it's stable now, but be careful.' The accident - in 1994 - was fatal.

Statistics suggest that compared to other outdoor sports, caving is relatively safe, but over the decades the Three Counties network has seen its share of deaths - the most recent in 2004, when a woman fell down a shaft, and in January 2001, when two cavers drowned trying to climb a shaft in Ireby Fell Cavern. Two months earlier, another was washed away by the main stream in Lancaster Hole. The worst decade was the Eighties: a man died while swimming in the Lancaster Hole sump pool, and three others were crushed by falling rock elsewhere in the system.

It's a Thursday evening - for the past 15 years, the regular after-work digging night for the Misty Mountain Mud Miners, a group of friends now pushing this little tunnel. As we retreat, other team members arrive and slide past us, armed with crowbars and the scaffolding. Before we head for the surface, Tim and I help them make space by moving rocks dug out from the sharp end. We pile them into 'drag trays,' plastic jerrycans cut in half and attached to a length of rope which can be pulled to the end of the narrow tunnel, to where the cave is big enough to stand.



Above ground near Gaval Pot

The Mud Miners have been making discoveries for years. But tonight the excitement is palpable. When the digging is done, we gather in time for last orders at the Marton Arms pub at the bottom of the hillside.

'It might take a month, it might take six, but there's a definite sense that this one will go,' says Hugh St Lawrence, who spends the more ordinary part of his life designing websites.



'And when it does...' He tails off. He doesn't need to finish the sentence, because everyone present knows what's at stake.

Sometimes, when cavers push a new passage, they have little idea where it might end up. This dig - which the cavers have christened, for obscure reasons, Bruno Kranskies - is different. Entered via the system known as Notts Pot, it is heading straight for Lyle Caverns, a remote part of Lost John's Cave, which until now has been entirely separate. The cavers' computerised survey shows the current limits of the two tunnels to be close. On the day before our digging trip, Tim and I lit joss sticks at the end of Lyle Caverns, watching as the smoke wafted horizontally on the draught, straight into the blockage. On previous occasions, cavers waiting on the other side have detected such smoke immediately. According to the survey, another 60 feet or so remain.

If and when that connection is made, it will fulfil a long-held caving dream. Bruno Kranskies is the last missing link in a sprawling 70-mile network of grottoes, tunnels and subterranean streams, by far Britain's longest. Once the link is established, the caves will run uninterrupted across the western flank of the Pennines, a single super-system joining the three counties of Cumbria, Lancashire and North Yorkshire.

The stalactites in a newly discovered part of the Three Counties System

Some entrances to the Pennine caves have always been obvious. For example, Gaping Gill, on the slopes of Ingleborough, is a black chasm 50ft across, where Fell Beck tumbles 365ft into a gigantic chamber - the highest waterfall in England. Lost John's, first partly explored in 1928, is equally difficult to miss: here, too, a large stream is swallowed by the moorland. However, most of the many - by now, at least 30 - ways into the burgeoning Three Counties System are more obscure.

One of the first to be discovered was Lancaster Hole, found by a caver named George Cornes on a hot afternoon in September 1946. Pausing for a breather on the slopes of Casterton Fell, he noticed that the grass by his feet was being blown by a cool wind that seemed to emanate from inside the earth. Removing the tussocks, he exposed a rocky hole leading downwards. By 1968, dogged exploration in and around Lancaster Hole had connected it to several other nearby entrances to form a system more than 12 miles long.

That year Dave Brook, a Leeds academic and a doyen of the Pennine scene, wrote an article in the university cave club journal.



'With (an) increasing understanding of the systems it becomes obvious that (they) form a single cave complex on an enormous scale which straddles the borders of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Westmoreland (as this part of Cumbria was then designated).'

‘I intended that to be the start of a detective story,’ says Brook. ‘And the exciting thing is that’s how it has turned out.’



Dye tests had established that the waters from Lancaster Hole, whose entrance lies in Cumbria, and Lost John’s in Lancashire were connected. However, it would take 21 years for cavers to fully establish that link.

Since the early Fifties, the known southward limit of the Lancaster Hole complex had been a line of entrances that runs along Easegill Beck, a moorland streambed. The only notable cave on the hillside above its left, southern bank was a constricted fissure, Pippikin Pot, that was thought to be impassable near the surface. In 1970, a determined team forced their way through its squeezes and down a series of shafts, and discovered a cavern five miles long. For most of the following decade, cavers dug in Pippikin’s blocked dry passages and tried to dive its sumps. Eventually it was connected to Lancaster Hole.

A simplified plan of Britain's longest cave - the Three Counties System, which now has more than 30 entrances and 70 miles of passage. Exploration began in 1928 and still continues

Pippikin also turned out to be the key to the longest and most dangerous connection of all – with the underwater passage at the bottom of Lost John’s. At the end of the Lost John’s ‘Master Cave’, a long, winding river tunnel, the roof dips beneath the surface of a dark, forbidding pool.



To carry the heavy and bulky equipment necessary for cave diving down the seven vertical shafts and lengthy horizontal passages between the entrance and the sump was an arduous task: ‘This kind of exploration simply can’t be done unless you’ve got an enthusiastic club to provide the sherpas,’ says Geo Yeadon, who with his friend Ian ‘Watto’ Watson began to explore the Lost John’s-Pippikin sump in 1975.



However, early diving forays revealed an upstream inlet passage about 800ft in. It surfaced after a short distance in Gavel Pot – yet another, somewhat easier system which thus became the base for further dives.

The longest of many dives from the Gavel-Lost John’s end was made by Yeadon in July 1986, with three lamps on his helmet, including a dazzling spotlight. At first, he found the going straightforward. He was swimming along a roomy, arched gallery over rippled banks of sand and gravel, and the visibility was good. Like all cave divers, he carried a reel of nylon line which paid itself out behind him as he swam – the way to safety when the time came to retreat. About half a mile into the sump – a long enough swim in an open pool, let alone in a claustrophobic tunnel with rock, not air, above – the cave abruptly changed, plunging downward to a depth of 90ft, and becoming more constricted.



‘As I went down, it got ever murkier,’ Yeadon says.



‘By the time I reached the bottom, I was in liquid mud. The roof wasn’t smooth any more but a maze of hanging pendants of rock. I clung on to one and tied a loop in the line around it so it wouldn’t get snagged. By the time I’d finished doing this I couldn’t see the loop in front of my face, even with the spotlight. I pushed on a bit in the hope of finding some viz (visbility), but there just wasn't any. Coming back blind, I went the wrong way between the pendants and got stuck. I suppose I had about five minutes of unpleasantness. I finally felt my way out. After that, I decided to try to make the link from Pip.'

It took a further three attempts spread over two years. In one hair-raising dive in 1988, Yeadon accidentally went the wrong way, swimming down in freezing water to a deep and descending passage that was heading not towards Gavel Pot but the huge resurgence at Leck Beck Head. During his return to the surface, chilled to the bone, he discovered he had come disconcertingly close to running out of air.



'By the time I reached the bottom of the 70ft underwater shaft that leads back to airspace in Pippikin I was shivering uncontrollably and my head was befuddled.'

The years of effort finally came good in May 1989. This time, Yeadon took no chances. Instead of a neoprene wetsuit, he wore a thickly insulated waterproof drysuit and carried two huge 110 cubic feet air bottles that weighed 60lb each.



'I felt like a miniature submarine,' he says.



This time, 450ft beyond the flooded shaft, he slipped through a low arch to find himself back among the hanging roof pendants he'd first explored from Gavel. As he advanced, his movements disturbed the silt: to see where he was going, he had to keep ahead of the cloud of mud he was stirring up.



After a bend, he was on the verge of giving up when he caught sight of the line he had left two years earlier running across the passage. He tied a loop in it and joined it to the line he was carrying with a metal karabiner.



Tim Allen deep in the muddy cave

From Lost John's to Pippikin, the length of the sump is close to 4,000ft. Lancashire and Cumbria had been linked. New technology has made the job easier. One crucial addition to the explorers' armoury is the portable, battery-powered rock drill. It allows cavers to scale overhanging and slippery vertical shafts from the bottom, by drilling a line of expansion bolts into the rock.



It also permits the removal of obstructive boulders by drilling holes and filling them with small explosive charges - caps - which will split the rocks into manageable pieces. Another technique is the use of hand and electric pumps. When Bruno Kranksies was first discovered, the passage ended in a static, muddy pool, a tight and undiveable sump. The first step towards realising its potential came two years ago, when the Mud Miners drained it.

But perhaps the most important step of all towards the realisation of the Three Counties network has been the production, for the first time, of a new and accurate computerised survey of most of the system, with all the raw information in the same database - a job that has taken six years, and many hundreds of individual caving trips.

'Most of the caves were surveyed when they were discovered,' says Becka Lawson, a caver and academic at Liverpool University who has helped to coordinate this work.



'But much of the old data - the vital information that tells you where you are underground and at what vertical level - had been lost. We still had the old line drawings of each separate cave. But if you don't know where you are, you don't know where to look for possible connections. Sometimes, once you put the surveys of two caves together, it's obvious where a link is likely to be. But underground, it may not be so clear.'



A caver emerges from the system

All the data can now be accessed using Survex, a computer programme that allows any part of the entire network to be viewed on a screen from any angle. It can also zoom in to reveal the fine detail of areas with possible links.

Survex was central to the latest major discovery, the breakthrough that's brought the Three Counties dream so tantalisingly close. In Yorkshire, at the southern end of the network, exploration in the Eighties and Nineties had opened up several miles of passage from three main entrances - Large Pot, Rift Pot and Low Douk. Large Pot was connected to Rift, and a link with Low Douk seems imminent. But until 2010, these caves remained quite independent of the Three Counties system. Apart from anything else, their streams reappear not at Leck Beck Head, but in a valley several miles to the south, Kingsdale.

For years, however, diggers felt sure they could bridge this gap by connecting Rift Pot to Ireby Fell Cavern, which had already been linked to Notts Pot and the main Leck Beck drainage. More than ten years ago, desperate efforts began in a passage in Ireby known as Adulterer's - apparently a comment on the morals of one of its early explorers.

'We started working it again in 2009, and it was obviously heading towards Rift,' says Ian Lawton, an engineer from Kendal. 'But though we made trip after trip, it was just too horrible to get much done.'

Turning their attention to Rift Pot, Lawton, his wife Liz, and their friend George North built a dam out of sandbags and used a pump to drain a waterlogged tunnel - the Temple of Doom - that had been found in the Nineties. Meanwhile, Becka Lawson and her colleague Neil Pacey completed the new Survex data.

'That was critical,' Lawton says. 'We realised Adulterer's was the wrong place to dig.'



Instead, they examined a mudbank in an inlet to the side of the main Ireby stream. In only one hour, they were through to 450ft of mostly spacious passage. It ended in a mud choke in a tunnel that looked identical to its newly drained counterpart in Rift.

'We were so convinced the link was imminent that the next weekend we had two teams: one in Ireby and one in Rift,' says Lawton.



'We were each carrying bags of produce to symbolise the two counties that contain the entrances. On the Ireby side, we had Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese. In Rift, they had Black Sheep beer, Wensleydale and a Yorkshire tea cake. As soon as we got to the blockage, I could hear their voices beyond. It sounded like there was only three feet to go.'



In fact, there were 30.

'We stayed there, manically digging, for the next nine hours. The air was getting bad because there were so many of us. We could hear the Rift Pot crew panting.'



But at 6pm on May 30, the way was finally open.



'We went to the pub but we were too tired to celebrate,' remembers Lawton. 'I had full body ache.'

Most cavers - this reporter included - have always found it difficult to explain their passion.



'I go to work and try to tell people what I've been doing and most of them say, "You did WHAT with your weekend?"' says Liz Lawton. 'Going for a walk across these moors, you might never imagine that a few hundred feet down there's a bloke with his face half in muddy water, his arms pinned to his side, trying to find a new way on.'

'When you're doing it, it can feel terrible,' says Ian. 'Yet afterwards in the pub you'll be talking about the next possible discovery. Suddenly it seems brilliant again. It's the belief that this horrible little passage is going to lead somewhere big, get you from A to B.'

'The excitement of a breakthrough makes up for all the hard work,' adds Mud Miners founder Dave Ramsay. 'You take a concept like the Three Counties system, that people have worked at for decades, and you want to see it done in your time, by your generation.'

Not only is that on the brink of being achieved, but now that Rift Pot and the caves beyond the watershed are also part of the system, there seems to be every chance of still greater extensions. Kingsdale, the valley where their streams resurge, already has its own huge network, part of which heads across a second watershed into yet another cave-riddled valley, Chapelle-Dale. As it spreads into Yorkshire, the super-system may well end up with more than 100 miles of passage, perhaps even 120 miles - enough to rank it high among the world's ten longest caves.

'That might take just a few years or it might happen after my lifetime,' says Tim Allen. 'You never know, and that's the attraction. Caves are where you find them.'

