Trip to Giant's Hole -- 29th Mar 2004

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Trip to Giant's Hole -- 29th Mar 2004

Group: Graham, Mary, Gordon, Dave

This trip had been a long time in the planning. The main sticking point was the need to choose a weekend Dennis couldn't make so that we wouldn't have a repeat of him being stuck in "the vice" and the subsequent retreat. Fortunately this weekend Dennis was "working" at a rock concert and so the trip was on. It didn't take long to drive to Giants, although the farm track is getting pretty rutted and maybe a bit of the dosh the farm acquires for the trespass fee could be ploughed back into a better surface. There were a couple of other cars parked up as we got changed in dry, but breezy conditions.

The entrance was only a short distance away.

and we headed off to Garland's Pot pausing only to look at some of the flowstone formations and patches of moonmilk.

The rigging of the ladder at Garlands took only a short time and the volume of water on the pitch was quite low. The passage down the crabwalk was boringly easy (for skinny people). This was in sharp contrast the previous trip were Dennis had to manhandled upwards to escape from a tight squeeze before "the vice".

It didn't take long to reach the eating house and climb up towards the giants windpipe. We met the occupants of one of the other cars at this point. There was a short detour to look at the dig in progress and talk a few photos of the formations.

The water level in the giant's windpipe was reasonably low and so the passage was pretty easy, if a bit wet. There was a slight amount of messing about as the right hand turn to the top of the streamway was missed, and there was a little bit of excitement climbing back down to the streamway: Gordon missed his footing at one point and plummeted a few feet which caused the rest of the party (all reasonably seasoned climbers) a few anxious moments, Fortunately there was no damage (or none he admitted to!) and after a short distance we were back in the streamway and thence to Garland pot. After a quick pull up the ladder we soon emerged into daylight, the lads from the other car arriving shortly after. We ajourned to the pub.