Great Masson Mine and Jug Holes - Dominika Wróblewska

Present:Luke, Lukas, Phil, Dominika

Thanks guys for a great trip!

Towards the end of the monthly TSG meeting, the hut started to slowly fill up with students from the York University Caving club who were staying over for the weekend. Our meeting was very low in numbers and it seemed that only me, Phil, and Alastair were staying at the hut that night. At about midnight arrived Luke Brock with his friend Lukas – a potential new club member who’d never tried caving before. They caught me in the bunk room just as I was about to go to bed. We chatted for a while and brainstormed which cave we should go to the next day. We wanted something quite easy and with no SRT because Lukas hadn’t done it before. Phil entered the room after a while and we used his expert caves-of-the-area knowledge to generate more ideas. We decided to visit the Masson mine and Jug Holes, anticipating that the quarry, in which Masson mine lies might be inaccessible because of the landowner’s diggers in work.

The hut came alive at the early morning hours with the inner doors shutting with a bang and the front door sounding with the excruciating sound of the doorbell. I went downstairs, where some York students were already sitting in the kitchen and more of them entering through the front door carrying food products. I went to take my caving gear out of the drying room, and heard somebody banging on the front door. It was John Gillett, who is a member of the Crewe Caving Club and whom I had met before in very similar circumstances. He announced that about 15 more people were coming and they’re all going to Peak cavern. More and more people started appearing through the door and more and more were coming down the stairs from the bunk rooms and soon the hut was packed. Peak Cavern would experience a large traffic that day as all groups were heading there.

Me and Luke scrambled some caving gear together for Lukas to borrow and we eventually left the hut at about 10:30am. Lukas brought with him a go-pro camera to document the trip and debated whether he should also bring his phone into the caves. We advised him against it.

We drove towards Matlock and parked on the side of a sloping road near the path leading up to the Masson Quarry. The walk up to it was very pleasant and the weather was surprisingly nice and warm with some sun rays seeping through the clouds. We looked at the quarry from above and some climbers were already there climbing up one of its walls. The quarry looked mysterious – all mossy and thick with small trees, most of which were cut down and lied on the ground; in the middle there was a ready to light campfire with twigs neatly stacked up in a circle. We greeted the climbers as we passed them and met with the enormous hollow in the wall at the far end. We climbed up the slope and looked for the entrance to the cave, which was somewhere in the ground. The area of the entrance was covered in dried, light in colour mud and as we slid down the hole the dry mud continued. Not used to such dryness in caves, I was impressed. We hadn’t gone any more than 10 metres beyond the entrance when we were brought to a halt. Lukas had dropped his phone into a mysterious hole. We went back to the previous passage where he was sitting to evaluate the situation. The hole in the ground split into two, one of which was tighter than the other. Phil slotted himself there to peek through one of the holes checking whether the phone was anywhere to be seen. I suggested that it would make more sense if I did it as I’m the smallest. Luke brought with him a 50m rope so we dropped that down the hole for assecuration. Phil stated that we really should not be putting ourselves in situations like this – dropping into tight holes without the knowledge of what’s beyond. I slid my legs in first – the gap in the rock was quite tight so I could not see past my legs but I fit right through it and held on the rope as I slid down. I was able to stand up in the passage and saw the phone on the ground. The passage continued and what was further ahead seemed familiar. I walked around a massive boulder and found myself in the chamber we’d been sitting in when we heard Lukas’ calls from the passage behind. The small hole was just an alternative way into the chamber and the phone could have easily been retreated by simply walking around a boulder.

We followed the passage down, which still looked very much cave-like. It was only until we entered the next chamber that I realised that a large part of our surroundings was mined. The walls throughout the entire mine were full of round holes and archways created by miners who would pick fluorspar out of the rock. The chamber we stood in had quite a flat floor, again covered with that dry mud. In the middle stood a rusted metal barrel and other abandoned tools and scraps surrounded the space. I spotted an opened rusty tin of sardines with its lid rolled back – it stood on a wooden plank and I can only assume that someone had put it there for better display, for others to appreciate or rather chuckle at. The chamber was an outlet to many passages, only one of which was the true way on. We stopped every now and then to examine the various intense pick marks on the walls creating complex patterns. Finally we reached a place where, through a tight squeeze in a slot at the bottom of the wall, started a true maze of passages. It was great to see Lukas excited about all these obstacles presented to us - with a joyful exclamation he tackled each one of them. It was pleasing to see someone so impressed with the underground and only on their first trip. It reminded me of some of my first caving trips in Derbyshire and how I too laughed every time I’d see the legs of the person before me wriggling and disappearing into a gap in the rock. A few passages later, emerging from a gap in the floor Lukas, with a smile on his face, stated that he felt like a child again. We reached the end of the mine, where the passage was narrow but tall. The floor was covered with old leaves and tree branches. We all looked up and noticed a shaft continuing through the ceiling and out into the outside world. Daylight seeped through it and so we switched our lights off and breathing in the fresh air, we stood there, contemplating.

On our way back, me, Phil, and Lukas crawled through the passages and at an opening to a large chamber waited for Luke to follow. He was nowhere to be seen and no sound was coming from the passage either. We sat looking into the big chamber and heard a noise coming out from the other end of it. I thought for a while that perhaps other cavers had ventured into the mine too but soon we heard Luke’s calling and light coming through a small crack in the wall on the left. We couldn’t see him but we could hear him clearly. He just took a wrong turn in the previous passage and ended up on the other side but with no exit, restricted by a layer of rock. The mine was full of treacherous dead-end passages like that.

We squeezed out the very essential (as Phil pointed out) hole again and sat on the other side of it to eat something before exiting the cave. We could not have picked a less photogenic location; and so we stared at the brown rock in front and ate Mars bars.

Somewhere during the trip Lukas said that he had always wondered what drew people to caves and why did certain people enjoy them so much. He convincingly stated that now he understood why. We climbed out of the quarry and the weather was still nice with no sign of forecast strong winds and rain. Crossing the road, we continued onto the next field and through low trees until the path sloped down and passed a few very large grassy ditches with bare rock protruding from them. The entrance to Jug holes was just around the corner at the bottom of the final ditch and hump. The entire wooded slope smelled strongly of garlic and I wondered where that was coming from. Lukas claimed to have found wild garlic and immediately ate a leaf. I did so too and at first I thought it tasted great but that was instantaneously followed by stinging, numbing pain in the mouth. Unfortunately I had already started chewing on it and the stinging spread from the tip of my lips down in to the back left side in my mouth. It felt as if a million needles were stabbing the flesh. The sensation wouldn’t go away for a long time and by the end of the day I could still faintly feel the numbness. I have reason to believe that the plant I had eaten was not advisably edible.

We entered the lower series of Jug Holes which presented us with a sudden sheer drop down between the rocks. We climbed down carefully and Luke decided to wait for us outside. We told him we’d manage to do that part of the cave in 30 minutes so he wouldn’t have to wait long. We stormed through the passages with most stops being the moments when we lost the way on. It was incredibly hard to figure out which was the correct way to get to the bottom of the cave. It was similar with the upper series on Jug Holes, the entrance of which was again a sudden drop between rocks. This time all of us went down and, again, quite quickly we made it to the end. On the way we passed a chamber filled with green volcanic ash; the walls and ceiling were of peculiar multi colour – red, green, yellow. At the far end of the cave, we sat on top of the flowstone domes, once probably white – now muddy and brown. The ceiling of the chamber was covered in graffiti – the letters were black and thick, which looked like it’d been done with a flame burning into rock. We stopped there for a while to for the last time take in the ambience and stillness of the cave before returning over ground.