A Craving For Caving?
No Thanks. I'd Only Get Stuck....
The entrance to Ogof Craig A Ffynnon & a man who sees getting stuck as part of the ‘fun’ (Nick Chipchase/geograph)
I love the beautifully understated snippets of information contained deep within one of the websites dedicated to Ogof Craig A Ffynnon, one of the many spectacular cave systems in South Wales.
“A large quantity of rock has fallen from the rock face above the entrance…”, it intones, before warning that, “…there is still more rock that is likely to fall”.
But that’s not all. If you managed to avoid a 40 ton rock falling on your head, then do pay particular heed to the advice that follows, the one that mentions that the picturesquely named ‘Gasoline Alley’ (I thought all caves had beguiling names like ‘Blue Grotto’ and ‘Cave of the Crystals’?) “…floods to the roof following heavy rain…”
That will have been more than enough for me. I’ve already gone home and all of my newly bought caving gear is now available on eBay…
You see, it’s not the sort of information that’s going to make me want see what life as a Morlock* was like in any particular hurry. Yet, just to make absolutely sure that they’ve successfully weeded out the wimps at the earliest possible opportunity, the narrative draws to a close with a chilling dose of reality.
You have to crawl through this gap to enter Ogof Craig A Ffynnon. How lovely. (Nick Chipchase/geograph)
“Caving…”, the website concludes, “…can be a dangerous activity”.
Really? And does a large furry mammal attend to his lavatorial needs in the woods as well?
I used to work with a dedicated caver. He’d graft away from Monday to Friday before, at weekends, driving off to one of the more remote parts of the country to find the deepest, darkest and dankest hole in the ground he could before squeezing himself into it for a couple of days or so.
A nice spot for a picnic. (Nick Chipchase/geograph)
He particularly enjoyed, as I recall, having to wriggle through particularly narrow passages, places that, if you weren’t careful, you could end up being stuck in.
He reckoned being in such a potentially perilous situation, really ‘focuses the mind’.
I bet it does.
And I’ll add to that by saying that, if it was me in that sort of situation, it wouldn’t as much focus my mind as freely and spectacularly relax my sphincter muscle.
Ogof Craig A Ffynnon is not a cave for tourists. Put it this way, having a leisurely stroll into Wookey Hole in Somerset does not, in anyway, prepare you for this subterranean behemoth.
Ogof Craig A Ffynnon. They do look like teeth, don’t they? (Nick Chipchase/geograph)
The cave is around 4 miles in length and is regarded as one of the more visually appealing in Wales. Much, I suspect to the delight of the seasoned caver, it contains an early abundance of sections where your only method of forward locomotion would involve crawling on all fours, part of that section being in a part of the cave that is regarded as ‘arduous and uncomfortable’.
The seasoned caver wouldn’t have it any other way.
This precedes some extremely wet and muddy passages before opening out and into a cathedral like space known as the ‘Hall of the Mountain King’, a large and welcome open cavern that contains an abundance of flowstones which, for those that want to know more, are made up of sheet-like deposits of calcite and other minerals which are formed as water flows through the floor of a cave.
After duly admiring all of this, the intrepid caver has to move on into what follows the Hall of the Mountain King which is a long series of low passages where, no doubt, plenty of minds have been focused as generation after generation of caver has squeezed and cajoled their complaining bodies through ever narrowing gaps.
Which sounds great fun.
For the seasoned caver, a trip here will be regarded as a fairly strenuous but by no means impossible day out doing what they love to do. For the rest of us however, conditioned both throughout life and in both literature and legend, that venturing into the bowels of the earth is something that, with the best will in the world, you really want to avoid if at all possible, it serves to remind us that, in our ever more sanitised and safety conscious world, there are still plenty of opportunities to take risks and stare potential danger in the face, however forbidding the environment might be.
And this is a particularly forbidding one.
*Reference to The Time Machine by HG Wells. Read the book, don’t bother with the film.
_______________________________
Thankyou for all the support and kind comments I have had regarding Harnser’s Blog throughout 2023. They are all very much appreciated.
I will be launching, alongside this one, a new series of blogs in 2024 which will focus on people rather than places.
Harnser’s People.
More information soon.