Dream Team - Rob and Joe
Mark had been tipped off about a large collapsed hole which had appeared in a local farmers field. Rob had already been lowered down in the days prior using a bit of twine tied round a telehandler fork to have a quick explore. He’d taken a quick video and wanted to return to survey it before the farmer filled it back in again
We met on a wintery evening where most of the TA gang had planned to go running followed by a film preview, however they were busy dropping like flies as we were both assembling. We had a vague plan to check out the damage on LWS afterward as well, so met in the car park and headed over to drop off the gear enroute. Rob’s plan was to use something he called the “butter knife”, which was just a long, bent crowbar, to poke in the ground and then attach a ladder and lower ourselves down. When he originally said ‘ground anchor’ I was imaging the sort of thing you pull cars out with, but I went along with it.
We made our way across the field in the blizzard, trying to find the hole in the melee, and fortunately spied it before we both wandered over the edge. I poked the butter knife into the ground about 10 cm and asked Rob if it looked good enough. He nodded and so off I headed, admittedly requesting he held it down while I descended the 3m diameter by 3m deep circular hole in the ground. He later admitted he wasn’t sure how far I’d actually stuck it in and that I should have done a lot more waggling to get it in…
The hole was filled with mud from the collapse and surrounded by relatively solid shale. There weren’t any major signs of mining, just a few marks on the walls where wooden stemples had previously sat. It was difficult to work out why it had collapsed, what was underneath us, and why the only visible passage heading off was conveniently at floor level.
We tried to survey the low passage heading off, but the combination of the cold and our body heat fogged up the disto lens, so it was refusing to take any splays at the first leg. After several minutes of fiddling with it, we gave up and decided to try another leg. Inexplicably, the disto wouldn’t measure splays longer than about 10 cm, but was fine with the much longer legs without fail. Both being absolutely bewildered by this phenomenon seemingly unencumbered by science, we moved on with just legs.
The initial passage hit a T-junction with the left hand ending immediately. To the right was a descending slop to a small chamber with two further ways heading off, both crawling sized levels with chossy, collapsing shale walls. It ended in a forefield to the left, and to the right, it stretched about 10 meters before getting tight and filled with shale and mud – slightly disappointing, but definitely a unique experience being entirely devoid of limestone.
On the way out, Rob took a few photos of the super shale layers, and we clambered back up out of the snowy hole. As Rob reached the top, the ladders were now buried under a lot of snow and had begun to sink into the ground, making grabbing the rungs virtually impossible and requiring a desperate scrabble to grab the barely-in butter knife. We started heading back across the field with the plan to do some digging at LWS still in our minds, but the snow was getting heavier, and I began to get a little more concerned about driving home. So, we decided to call it a day and check the road conditions in Eyam. Mercifully, the roads weren’t too bad, and even more mercifully, the Mechanics was still open, and coincidentally where I had chosen to leave my car.