My first trip down this cave, all I remember from it was Dan screaming his lungs off after going through the ruminants of a sheep between pitch 3 and 4. I remember some of the pitch heads being awkward but nothing too difficult.
From reading the trip report I somehow derigged a rebelay with a bag and was trying to take Dan up the pitch with me, no wonder it was such hard work!
From reading Pete's trip report, that I won't put here, I had lots of trouble getting said bag out, I guess I was not used to taking bags out of hard caves, I still had not gotten used to them yet.
Kate wrote: Having recently forked out for club membership and gained access to the forum, I though it was
about time I organised a trip underground. Boggarts is a cave that should be doable in most weather
conditions so I thought it would be a good bet. There was snow on Ingleborough, but on the day it
was so cold there was no chance of any of it melting.
I suggested meeting in Inglesport at ten o’clock. Pete didn’t like that idea and told everyone to meet
in Bernies at nine. I turned up at ten and they were all still there. Well they had to be as I had all the
ropes (except the two that Pete brought still covered in Titan mud!). The greasy empty plates
showed that they had used the time well.
The slog up the hill was a steep unremitting grind and we all arrived at the shakehole very glad of Pete’s unerring sense of direction. With the whole hillside covered in white, he took us directly to the hole, no messing.
Pitch one was a daylight rift, via a thorn bush onto a heap of mud. From here we had to take the least obvious of two ways on, which led immediately to Bone pitch. Next was a thrutchy crawl leading straight out over the top of Lost Persons pitch (who thinks up these names?). I made this more difficult than it needed to be by facing the wrong direction and ended up trying to rig off anchors behind me.
Then we found the sheep. This has obviously decayed somewhat since the last BRCC descent of
Boggarts, fortunately to the point that there is no smell. It is, however, still recognisable as a sheep,
or rather, bits of sheep. I climbed over it and then heard Dan squealing as he sat in it and smeared it
all over the backside of his oversuit. Others might have said he screamed like a girl. It was funny
though.
Fever pitch is reached after a short, head down, sideways crawl, with the Y hang bolts round the
corner out of sight. The good book (NFTFH) describes this as narrow and awkward with difficult
rigging. I guess the fixed anchors have made the rigging easier, but the approach didn’t seem too
bad.
After a short crawl, we shimmied over a blind pit to the fifth pitch, which landed us in Penguin
Hall. I was a little anxious about the crawling to the next pitch. The description sounded horrible,
involving building a dam to divert water – what water? It was dry, was I in the wrong place? I soon
got to Punani passage, which was nothing like as bad as I had imagined and in no time at all we
were at the top of Blind Mans Bluff Pitch.
After BMBP was the tightest bit of the cave, a very short flat out and grunting squeeze. Most of us managed this
with SRT kit on and emerged head first over the top of Loose Tooth Pitch (good job we had a dentist with us!).
Two more pitches got us to the bottom of the cave where there was a little half hearted grovelling down a blind
ending crawl so as to be able to tell Rob and Dunc that we had bottomed the cave and they hadn’t.
Having calculated that we had four tackle bags and six people, I made my way up the cave closely followed by
Chris. He overtook me at the fifth pitch in an attempt to get out before the urgent need to defecate filled his pants.
I followed but was careful to heed his warning not to wander about near the entrance. We gave up on the idea
of waiting for the others out on the hillside and returned to the cars for dry clothes.
I sat and waited, and waited, and waited until eventually
there were lights coming down the hill. I understand the delay was caused by a combination of four bags between three people (Beryl had escaped (why is he called Beryl?)), awkward pitch heads, tackle bags catching on rebelays and little impromptu derigging along the way.
Suffice it to say that all six of us bottomed the cave. I was a little disappointed in the lack of pretties
but all in all it was a good day out.
