Lathkill Head Cave - Alan Brentnall
The weather was pretty foul as the five of us met up at the layby at the head of Lathkilldale, on the Monyash to Bakewell road; heavy rain and a strong westerly wind made for a night where the fire, a beer and the telly might be the best idea. But Bernie, Steve, Jane, Jess and I had decided on a trip into Lathkillhead Cave - but via the Upper Entrance, the main cave entrance in the valley below being flooded out with a serious amount of water.
The top end of the dale was all sludge and puddles as we made our way down to the point where the track cuts right towards One Ash Grange. We followed this until it swings right (just after the Garden Path entrance) and we cut off left through a field with a dry re-entrant where we found the gate above our cave.
Well, it doesn't look much like a cave; it's more like a lidded mine shaft. For this is the point where Ben, Moose, Shaun and Co had created an exit in 1985, after extending the crawls previously passed (Tigers 1, 2 and 3), and having finally defeated the lethal Lathkiller Choke and climbed up from the Waiting Room. This little manhole cover doesn't look much, but it leads to some of the prettiest cave passages and chambers in the Peak District.
Having applied the "Derbyshire Key" to the lid, Steve got cracking with the rigging while I fired up the gas monitor - this cave is notorious for its high levels of carbon dioxide, as are many other underground venues in the Lathkilldale catchment, and, pretty soon, all five of us were encsconsed in the shaft, with the lid down, finally out of the rain.
The pitch is a beauty. A Y-hang between a cluster of short colonnades and a Ben-style cold chisel is followed by a deviation to another Y-hang on a ledge further down. Below this, the rope is again deviated away from a sharp edge into the top of a great aven full of calcite ledges and stalactites. It's a pitch to take your time over, so that you can see all the formations.
We all met up at the foot of the rope, in a chamber adorned by stalactites, and protected by a taped path. This is the Waiting Room, and it used to have a "No Waiting" cone, left in place by some wag with a sense of humour. Here some of us ditched some of our rope-climbing gear, as this was the end of the rope work, before making our way across the chamber to the boulder choke which guards the climb down.
The climb's much easier when you re-ascend it, largely because you can see where you are putting your feet, but it does land you close to some beautiful formations as you thread yourself through the boulders and into the wide, flat-out crawl to the huge chamber which was christened Lathkiller Hall, after the Lathkiller Choke.
In summer, this place is often as dry as a bone. But tonight, an energetic stream was thundering through, coming out of Tiger 4 and sumping in the top of the climb down into the Lathkiller Choke. The ceiling is crowded with thin straw stalactites, and the whole place rings to the sound of the river as it clatters through the stones on its way to Lathkilldale. Quite an awe-inspiring sight, and one of the reasons why cave exploration is so rewarding.
The outward-bound journey was fairly relaxed. I brought up the rear so that I could get some photographs, and de-rig, and, when we returned to the surface, we found that the rain had stopped, and the clouds had been replaced by a black starry sky. It was on my way back up through the boulders that my gas monitor started alarming. The oxygen level was still quite reasonable, at around 20%, but the carbon dioxide level had climbed up to 1.7%, suggesting that, like the Waterfall Chamber of Knotlow Cavern, the CO2 is carried in with the stream.