Rachel Turnbull, Keiran A, Sam Lee, Neil Cox, Leanne
It’s the year of caving. As such, in January I set my sights on No.1 on Britain’s hit list: the elusive and mysterious Otter Hole. I sent my plea to the Royal Forest of Dean Caving Club and heard back saying we’d secured a date in June. Hurrah! A once-in-a-life-time trip. My intense research began in preparation for our over-tide trip, a bid to get to the very end of the cave and back, racing the tides.
For those that don’t know, Otter Hole offers a unique caving trip under Chepstow race course. There is a sump about 1 hour into the cave, which floods entirely to the roof and drains to about knee-high throughout the day, roughly in time with the tidal River Wye. For safety in navigating the tides, and for conservation efforts, the entrance is gated, and you need a guide, meaning there’s only 20 trips a year. There are two types of trip: a between-tide trip that may get you about half way (to where all the pretties are in 6 hours) and an over-tide trip (to the end and back in 10-12 hours).
As we set off down to Cardiff on Friday night, a battery of texts flew about the group chat. It seems, that although we were asked to meet in the carpark at 11am ahead of our 12 hour trip, Neil had committed to running a naturist event in Macclesfield at 7pm that night. Leanne shrugged and said this was her fourth caving trip. I began to worry that no one knew what they had signed up for. I rang Sam, the most sensible of the group (potentially?), who openly admitted to a strategy of knowing absolutely nothing of our trip, because “well, we’ve got a guide”.
Our guide was the lovely Gareth Farrow, who then went on to disclose that he’d never led a group before, and he had never been beyond halfway before and really only took the trip on in an attempt to spend time winding Neil up.
My blood pressure rocketed and we accelerated down the M5.
Nonetheless, dawn came very quickly after whiskey and we met at the car park at 9am.
Within about 25 minutes, I was convinced that half the party wanted to turn back. The early part of the cave is fairly small, crawling and twisting up through boulder chokes. Everything was lined with mud, which developed into inches-deep, oozy mud, crescendoing at the sump.
At the sump, we were lucky that the water was now knee-high, and we scooted through. The cave continued in a similar awkward fashion, up a ladder and along the Mendip way. I was chastised for noting some calcite formations along the way. “These are nothing yet!”
Eventually, the Hall of the Thirty is reached, and rooms upon rooms of increasingly fantastical formations glisten in the Fenix light. It was fairly breath-taking, the sheer scale of the calcite and the pristine condition it’s been afforded by the sump. I’m an engineer, not an artist of words so you should probably go and see for yourself.
Onwards led to easy caving, where the nature of the cave changed again and we followed the survey up and over boulders, down stomping passages, all the way to the Terminal sump. The way back was much quicker, and we had 45 minutes to spare waiting for the sump to open. Watching the water drain was a pretty tortuous task for me. After sandwiches, cake and sweets, Neil was fuelled up and impatient, and attempted crossing using a technique usually reserved for flooded-in emergencies. A tight-rope walk across the dive line, invisible below the current level of the water. This brought a lot of fun, as he strained his muscles, writhed about on the dive line, and palmed off the walls all in vain. After a certain threshold, the sump started to drain more obviously and noisily and we all made the journey to the land of the living. Time underground 10.5 hours.
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| Photo: Gareth Farrow |
Thank you to the entire party, who have shaved years off my life with stress and put laughter lines on my face. Thank you to the Royal Forest of Dean Caving Club who protect this unique landscape and Gareth was an excellent addition to our group. And to Neil, who 8 hours before the trip (and after the pub) deep-dived into Otter-research, compiling a thorough route description from fragments of trip reports (all written in different tenses and styles) from across the internet. It more than made up for his months of ambivalence towards the trip. Finally, thank you to Emily and Dave for letting us sleep on their building site.
10/10 would Otter again.