It was summer 1955. We decided to meet up again the following Easter at Ingleton. So in 1956, after exploring a few caves around Ingleton and Clapham, we decided to form ourselves into a proper group. It was August-September 1956 we held a meeting in the Wheatsheaf Hotel, Ingleton.

THE CAVERNS OF MOSSDALE SCAR PART TWO by Mike Boon

Bobby dutifully slotted himself into the gap but he couldn't make it either. He came out and climbed over the hole into the continuation of the main passage and in a few seconds we heard his excited shout; there was a second hole with the clear sound of running water below. The lost stream of Mossdale Scar! We slid down into a nasty little rift with a stream emerging from some boulders. The rift continued downstream but before pushing on we stopped for a cramped meal. Then we packed up and plunged into the unknown. We were stopped ten feet on by an impossible choke and disgustedly left the hole. Back in the main passage, Ken amused himself by opening up the first hole we had tried while I went to sleep. He was still at it when I woke up and I remarked that it probably led down to the bit of stream we had been in. Ken pondered this for a minute or so then said I should go down and find out. Wearily I slid into the miserable rift, shone my light onto his boots and struggled out again.

There was nothing more to keep us. On the long trek out we explored several side passages to the left, mainly muddy crawls leading to chokes, but one led to a magnificent arched passage with a clean floor, Tunnel Caves perhaps. At Fourways Chamber we stopped for another meal, and by the time we had covered Kneewrecker and Rough Passage to reach Rough Chamber, I for one was very weary. We had very little light; two flat accumulators, one reasonable one, one fading torch. Route finding was not easy and when the torch died we had only one light between us. Then at Assembly Hall Bobby snagged the lead of his accumulator on a rock and broke it. His lamp was a different make to ours and we were faced with the prospect of sitting in the dark until someone came for us. Ken was equal to the occasion. He flashed his lamp, which had recovered slightly, for two or three seconds at a time while Bobby rushed along the telephone wire as far as possible. Ken and I would then close up to him. The way was complex and this process took a long time. "Couldn't we take our shirts off and burn them?" said Bobby. Our groping finally brought us to the entrance as the sun set.

A few weeks later I left for the South and it was not until 1963 that I once again found myself living in Yorkshire. I was surprised to find that Far Marathon had remained unexplored in the intervening three years. My interest grew and after the 1963 Gouffre Berger trip, I arranged with Bobby Toogood to go down on the first fine weekend. Others were interested in pushing Far Marathon too, notably Dave Judson, the Leeds University lads and Ken Pearce. There was a hint of competition in the air, which added to the excitement.

That year was exceptionally wet even for the Dales and weekend after weekend the streams were in heavy spate until I despaired of ever getting into Mossdale. I was living in Clapham at the time and on the Monday the beck was roaring in full flood over the waterfall at the top of the village for the thirtieth time that summer. The next three days were dry and the peaty waters dropped surprisingly. On Thursday, I phoned the Manchester Weather Centre which forecast a dry weekend. Immediately I got in touch with Bobby, only to hear that he was not well and didn't feel up to Mossdale. To have the right weather and yet not to be able to tackle the cave was infuriating. On the Friday I got through to Pete Livesey and the trip was on.

I met Pete at Skipton bus station next day and we caught the bus out to Grassington. We took the road up to Yarnbury, where the rolling moorland was disfigured by long abandoned spoil heaps. Two and a half miles out of the village the road dipped down into a broad shallow valley and we took a green track along one side through magnificent purple heather. In the valley bottom were the remains of old dams for washing the ore, mixed up with depressions where the ground had slumped into some underground cavity. We reached the remote farmstead of Gill House and three farm dogs hurled themselves at the end of their chains in fury. Up the valley the Yoredale limestone outcropped as lines of grinning teeth curving round the hillside. The valley was totally deserted, hemmed in by black moors and heavy, slowly moving cloud. Would it rain? We didn't know, but we decided to take our chance.

We changed and paddled over the shrunken beck to the entrance, each with a heavy bag of carbide, food and spare electric lights. In view of all the tales we were ready for twenty four hours down the cave, longer if it flooded. Pete led the way through the boulders and down the streamway. We travelled slowly, careful not to use any more energy than was necessary. The first Drown or Glory was like a great washing tub with thick yellow foam coating the roof for fifty feet before it. This was evidently a relic of the heavy flooding five days before. The second Drown or Glory was coated in the same way, the light reflecting foam contrasting oddly with the jet black rock of walls and roof.

An hour from the entrance we reached Rough Chamber and put on kneepads for the crawls ahead. Rough Passage went easily enough, a long slithering crawl over the polished grit. We tied our bags to our feet and they slid along after us with no trouble. More alarming were the signs of the recent flood; every nook and cranny in the roof was filled with slowly disintegrating froth mixed up with blades of grass and bits of heather. All the low crawls beyond Rough Chamber, 4,000 foot of passage, must have been totally filled up only five days before. Anyone in them at that time would have stood no chance.

Near Marathon struck off the main passage as a rift just high enough to lurch along upright. The rock was full of sharp fossils but the going for 200 foot was surprisingly easy. After this, the cave shrank to a tunnel eighteen inches high, twelve wide. We wriggled in sideways, toecaps scraping the walls, packs dragging over the gritstone pebbles. This was more like it. But before long the passage enlarged to a square tunnel just the right size for hands and knees crawling. The going continued varied, some crab-walking, some crawling, some flat-out work, pleasantly sporting rather than desperately arduous. Then we had a rude shock. I was ahead at the time when the passage grew tighter and tighter over a distance of twenty feet or so. Pushing hard on one side I was suddenly aware of a pool of water ahead and moving my neck round saw a black pool filling the narrow cleft to within three inches of the roof. Ahead there seemed to be a right angle bend mostly full of water. I squeezed in and immediately stuck, the way on to the right being choked with stones underwater. Water flooded into the suit as I tried to clear the stones with one hand while keeping my nose above water. This ghastly going continued for thirty or forty feet to an easy crawl and in a few seconds we had reached what we judged to be Far Marathon Chamber, roughly 900 foot from Kneewrecker Junction.

This point had been reached by a Leeds party on the same date as my first trip into Mossdale. Beyond, the cave had remained unvisited for twenty-two years. A flat-out crawl led from the far side of the chamber. I wriggled in and in a few foot was stopped by a coffin-shaped block that had settled out of the roof. We had been warned about a boulder blocking the entrance to Far Marathon by Bob Leakey; presumably this was it. I strained to shift the boulder with no success but at length I managed to squeeze over it. Once on the far side I had more room to work and moved it a couple of inches to let Pete through. After a struggle, he pulled it well out of the way.

Beyond, the stream ran through low elliptical passages of resonant rock. The familiar floor of sandstone, with its groove for the water, rose gently to meet the roof on either side of the six foot wide passage. Pushing one arm ahead with our bodies in the centre we made good progress round bend after bend, with the cave dropping steadily all the while. Some hundreds of feet on our stomachs brought us to a barrier of black stones cemented together. Presumably it had built up since Leakey's exploration. We broke it down bit by bit until we could squeeze over it. At the same time, I felt this succession of obstacles was sapping both our physical strength and our will to push the passage to the limit.

Further hundreds of feet of low cave followed. Although we could never rise from our knees, kneepads and gloves made progress quite painless. The roof lowered once more until we were once again slithering along like serpents but by now we were used to it and kept up a good pace. About four hours from the entrance the roof gradually gained in height over a shallow canal. No doubt about it - we had cracked it. And yet, even though we seemed to have been crawling forever, the Marathons had not been nearly as bad as we had expected. Bent double, but at least on our feet, we followed the canal downstream. After some distance, the roof lowered close to the water surface, beyond we climbed onto a pile of boulders. Overhead a black gash cut across our passage at right angles. Up there were the High Level Mud Caverns. Downstream were Stream End Caverns.

We ate cheese, dried fruit and chocolate, feeling completely cut off by the mile or so of black constricted passages between us and the surface. Our meal finished we squeezed into a low opening at the foot of the far wall. A great flat slab took us to a boulder slope down to the stream. The stream passage curved onward, roof rising, dull black walls widening. With the stream flowing quietly over coarse sand the passage could justifiably be called a Main Drain, and yet there was a certain angularity and wildness about it that never allowed us to forget we were in Mossdale. Three hundred foot from the High Level Mud Caverns a large stream entered from an opening on the left, no doubt Leakey's "passage big enough to drive a cow along".

Downstream the cave grew even loftier and more impressive. There were two bends where the cave swung savagely to the left before straightening out again. On the second bend was a monumental boulder almost blocking the twenty foot wide passage. We scrambled up its eight or nine foot shoulders and on the other side cut through a triangular passage half-full of clear water to reach the main stream, which had followed a zig-zag route. A twenty foot high passage with dark greasy walls reaching up to dimly seen recesses followed. We saw no sign of the passage shown leading off to the right on Bob Leakey's survey. Perhaps he mistook one of the recesses for the start of a passage.

The last section of the cave was a rounded tunnel thirty foot high and ten foot wide where the stream flowed under tightly packed boulders. Balancing our way forward we came to a wall of massive boulders across the passage - The Final Choke. We managed to squeeze down into the stream but it was soon lost into the rocks. Through gaps in the choke we could see ten or fifteen foot ahead in places but to have cleared a way through such a precarious mass would have been madness. In any case, the chances of passing the choke were extremely slight whatever risks were taken. Pete climbed a slope to the right which led quite a height above the stream, but even here, there were loose piles of boulders and feeling that nothing short of a full-scale mining operation would get us anywhere we left it as a bad job.

Next on the list of possibilities was the tributary passage we had already noticed referred to by Leakey as "big enough to drive a cow along." After four foot any such attempt would have been doomed to failure, as the passage continued as a flat out crawl in the stream. Once through this, we walked up a comfortable rift for thirty feet to a further lowering of the roof over the stream. The water was dammed up by the pebbles and soon we were crawling shoulder-deep. Pete had a better suit and went ahead. After a minute I heard his shout and wallowed reluctantly after him. My goon suit was giving up the ghost with water pouring in from half a dozen tears. A scramble along a "v"-section rift the other side took us into a chamber strewn with angular boulders. We clambered over them to where the stream flowed from a handsome passage eight or ten foot wide which we followed for about 200 feet.

A wedge of boulders and mud about fifteen foot high stopped us. The stream found a way through at floor level but there was no hope here. I used Pete's shoulder as a foothold to claw a way to the top of the blockage and slid down the other side on a doubled nylon line. Here the stream flowed from a much narrower passage. In a few yards, it turned abruptly to the right and choked. The choke looked fairly easy to dismantle but I left it to rejoin Pete. On the way back we estimated the length of Minicow Passage as about 400 foot, probably heading north or north-east. Quite possibly the Minicow stream is the same one that Bob Leakey had seen below the floor of Tunnel Caves in Kneewrecker Series.

At the rift leading up to the High Level Mud Caverns Pete sorted out the food while I climbed up the slippery fifteen foot or so into the Caverns. They were immense, with expanses of unbroken rock for roofs and huge peat mud deposits sloping down from the walls. A funnel of mud slopes led down to the entry rift. Bob Leakey had not explored the north-trending branch of the Caverns and I pushed on in this direction first. For several hundred feet, I walked along the silent, moist tunnels, rarely seeing bare rock above the mud. Then the going became more intricate, with a slide down a rock face, several crawls under rock curtains and switchback mud slopes. Perhaps six hundred foot from the start the hill of peat mud became much heavier and rose to the roof to block the way completely. There was no way on without digging so I turned back.At the entry rift once more we chewed some chocolate and climbed back into the Caverns. This time, we were exploring the tunnel leading south which Leakey had never pushed to the limit. It was a very hopeful passage, with luck it would take us back to the main stream beyond the impasse of the Final Boulder Choke. We edged round the side of the mud funnel above the rift, kicking footholds