Chris wrote at the time:
We woke up to clear blue skies, unexpectedly, and all met up at the campsite, then headed off to the
rather secret location of Uamh nan Iongantan Fior, or Cave of True Wonders, the recently discovered
jewel in Scottish caving’s crown. A slightly awkward manoeuvre at the entrance led into a wet crawl.
Alex went in first, then me, then Dave. Nic was having second thoughts and then Daz shouted (or
perhaps he just spoke at his normal volume, but it was loud enough) that he wanted to spend the
day walking so that he could be alone with his thoughts. It sounds as if he had a fantastic day walking
and, if his tales are to be believed, had a voyage on a par with that of Odysseus.
The wet crawl downstream only took a few minutes and soon the true wonders were encountered.
We were mesmerised by the formations in this cave – absolutely pristine calcite, with perfect
flowstone, enormous stalactites and unblemished straws throughout. Having stared open-mouthed
at the decorations for a while, we headed back to the surface to find Young Nic still grinning away,
and managed to coax him inside. We then did the whole trip again for double the fun.
After exiting we headed to Uamh nam Breagaire or Cave of the Liar, which has two entrances in the
bank of a dry river bed. Before entering this there was a minor incident involving Alex snatching a
sandwich from the grasps of Young Nic, but let’s not go into that now. Alex and Nic went in the
upper entrance, and I followed Dave into the lower entrance. This started as sideways crawling and
involved a bit of hands and knees crawling down Jawbone Passage into the main chamber, where we
met the other two. A small, obvious, triangular hole in the floor of this chamber (about ten times
the size of the small, obvious triangular hole in the floor of Boireau Falls Chamber in Langcliffe Pot)
provided an entertaining slide down into some crawling passage, which we followed without any
route-finding problems, and finished up at a lovely little hole in the floor called Flowstone Pot. We
did not descend this as we are very good people and had no intention of dirtying the formations.
Reversing a little, we found a narrow passage and Alex and I penetrated, then slid our slender frames
through a squeeze into Straw Chamber, which actually had longer straws that the Cave of True
Wonders. On exiting the awkward squeeze, a sharp bit of rock dug into my back and gave me a very
rough massage, reminding me of Thailand. We all headed out the upper entrance, which was a lot
wider than the lower one, with a brief mix of walking and crawling, culminating in an easy, though
fairly loose, scramble back to the world.
