Friday

Photo © Thomas Leung. Chelsea Spelaeological Society.

We arrive at the Chelsea hut, it’s ruddy slippy on the last stretch due to an early snow fall that gave some spectacular views:

Photo © Thomas Leung. View out over Langattock taken from out side White Walls hut Sat morning.

Before having a few drinks and turning in for the night we went to go and dig out the entrance of Daren Cilau. Turns out there wasn’t that much snow in the entrance just a few icicles.

Photo © Thomas Leung. Entrance to Ogof Daren Cilau.

Photo © Thomas Leung. Icicles in Ogof Daren Cilau entrance. The white wire on the right is for an emergency phone system. The Hammer on the left so so you can break the ice should the puddle freeze up (Allegedly)

Saturday

Cracking trip down Daren to seen the antlers and urchin oxbow. Crawl in was interesting with the water in the crawl having lumps of ice in, it that water was COLD. Taking a can of paraffin and a washing up bowl with us also made things more interesting (they were both destined for the “hard rock café” but we took them to “big chamber (nowhere near the entrance)” which is on the way).

Photo © Thomas Leung. Dan Heggs beginnings of jigsaw passage, Ogof Daren Cilau..

The nature of Darren is that a long small diameter crawl leads to a huge cave with lots of big passage with occasional tight bits. One such tight bit being “the wriggle”:

Photo © Thomas Leung. Caver in the wriggle , Ogof Daren Cilau. It’s a blurry photo but shows the comparative width of the passage nicely.

Next it was on the aptly named Big Chamber (Nowhere near the entrance) to sign in:

Photo © Thomas Leung. Signing in with proposed route, Big Chamber (Nowhere near the Entrance), Ogof Daren Cilau.

From here it was an easy stomp down epocalypse way to get to the first set of pretties.

Photo © Thomas Leung. flow stone in epocalypse way, Ogof Daren Cilau

Photo © Thomas Leung. Stal and helictites in epocolypse way , Ogof Daren Cilau.

However we turned back before we got to the antlers proper due to a flying bat, In case there were more and so as not to disturb them a swift exit was made a quick nosey in to urchin oxbow was had instead. This was our first time in urchin oxbow and it was truly spectacular. Its accessed by a short climb <3m which proved rather tricky, resulting us posting one member up to rig a sling:

Photo © Thomas Leung. Tom, top of climb to urchin oxbow , Ogof Daren Cilau

But its well worth the little climb:

Photo © Thomas Leung. Urchin oxbow , Ogof Daren Cilau.

Photo © Thomas Leung. Tom with urchins, urchin oxbow , Ogof Daren Cilau.

Photo © Thomas Leung. Close up of an urchin, urchin oxbow , Ogof Daren Cilau

After this it was the long slog back out. A good trip, it almost made the crawl worth while!

Sunday

After saturdays escapades I was the only one of the three from the Daren trip to want to cave so I tagged on a group going down ogof agen allwed. This was probably a mistake as I was pretty broken from the day before. Luckily people wanted to leave early anyway we turned around after the first bolder choke and headed out.

It was a great weekend all round. Many thanks to the guys from SUCC, Especially Tom for letting me use his photos - Cheers mate.

Tags: Ogof Daren Cilau, Ogof Agen Allwedd