Battlefield Cavern

The White Scar Caves visitor trail ends in a vast underground cavern called Battlefield Cavern, so called because the pile of boulders at the entrance looks like the aftermath of a battle between giants. It is over 330 feet long and 100 feet high in places. It was discovered as recently as 1971, by a teenage girl called Hilda Guthrie, a member of the Happy Wanderers caving club. She entered the cave by coming up through a tunnel in the base, holding her breath and swimming through a water-filled 'sump', to then surface and discover the massive cave. Just imagine how exciting that must have been! Visitor access to the cavern was achieved in 1991, when tin miners from Cornwall blasted a 65 metre sloping tunnel to connect the cavern with the existing stream tunnel lower down. It is pretty phenomenal! It's rather attractive in parts too, with the delicate stalactites illuminated by coloured lights. 

Under Ingleborough

Cave systems like White Scar Caves are formed by groundwater and underground streams dissolving the limestone rock, sculpting out tunnels and caverns. It's an amazing subterranean landscape, with streams, waterfalls, huge caverns and strange formations of stalactites and stalagmites, pillars and flowstones, formed when the calcium carbonate dissolved in the dripping water builds up over thousands of years.

It's quite difficult to photograph. It's much darker inside than the photos suggest, with key features picked out by lights. You aren't allowed to use flash or tripods so I had to use the highest ISO my camera allows, with a slow shutter speed and wide aperture. A lot of my pictures came out really too blurred to use. The metal walkways are rather bouncy too with a group of about 20 tramping along them! But I think you can get an idea of what it was like from these pictures.

Some of the formations have been given names, like the one above. There was 'the judge's head' (a small stalagmite that looked like a head wearing a wig), 'the witch's fingers' and 'the devil's tongue'.

Wherever you are, underground, you can hear flowing water, and sometimes the waterfalls and streams are visible.

Deeper into the system there were some huge caverns, quite awe-inspiring.

Going caving

I met up with my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters at White Scar Caves recently, to do a spot of caving! White Scar is up near Ingleton, on the western edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, deep underneath Ingleborough, one of the famous Yorkshire 'Three Peaks'. It is the longest 'show cave' (ie: those that the general public can enter) in Britain, as visitors can walk about half a mile inside the system, though experienced cavers have, of course, explored much further into the whole system of tunnels.

The system was first discovered in the 1920s but some of the guided walk we took was opened up much more recently. There is a trail of natural tunnels that have had concrete paths laid, metal walkways with streams flowing beneath and some long staircases; some sections require you to double over and creep under low overhangs. The hard hats were mandatory and very necessary. I'm not a great fan of being underground in enclosed spaces... You'd never get me actually potholing, even when I was younger. But the visitor trail is safe inside, even for little children to walk through, and the caves are very interesting. It does sometimes flood, but they have a careful monitoring system and would not allow you inside if there was any danger. The children had to wear woolly hats under their safety helmets. Even then, the littlest one managed to knock hers off (there was no chin strap) and lose it in the abyss!