With: Alan Rainford & Fergus Blair
Weather: a gap between a series of intense Atlantic lows gave a clear, cold starry night with flecks of snow covering the moor
Where: Faulds Brow (NE of Caldbeck, Cumbria)  |
| Alan Rainford - on Faulds Brow |
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| Ferg - Doctor's Pot? |
You may have gathered that we have been getting a bit frustrated with the weather of late & again tonight was planned as an evening cave trip, however, torrential rain all day discouraged us from traveling down to the Dales. Instead we opted for some night nav in search of the very local Doctor's Pot - its been on our list of somewhere to check out for years.
Doctors Pot is listed in" Northern Caves 3" on p.250; its discovery is credited to the Friends School of Wigton Outdoor Activities Group (FSWOAG) through a dig in 1970. A Google search for: Doctor's Pot; Friends School of Wigton Outdoor Activities Group or FSWOAG fails to turn up anything relevant in the first two pages.
I know that Google searches for caves / pot holes often list content of this blog so if you arrive here and know anything about this obscure pot hole or FSWOAG then please do leave a comment & let me know any further information.
Northern Caves 3 lists the location of the Pot Hole at NY291407.
We drove along the Westward-Faulds road & parked at the track leading to the quarry in order to give us an unequivocal point from which to start our night nav. We took a bearing to the above grid reference and paced the distance to it, this led us to a series of small shakeholes & we verified our position by GPS as exactly 291407, however, extensive searching in the immediate vicinity yielded no pot hole. Widening of the search led us to discover at NY 290405 (i.e. some 200m south and slightly west of the quoted grid reference) to a feature that closely resembled the cave entrance: "at base of a small cliff in NE corner of largest of a complex of depressions". A very marshy area was draining into the entrance - also consistent with the Northern Caves 3 description. Across the entrance was a large wooden beam which looked exactly like a belay point for any underlying shaft. We weren't able to investigate very far into the apparent cave entrance due to the large amount of water (it has been exceptionally wet); the slightly unstable look to the surrounding rock and our lack of relevant equipment on the nght - we will have to return.
So did we find Doctor's Pot? If we did it is a couple of hundred metres away from the quoted guidebook entrance or we found something else .
If you know more - please let me know!
We got back to Blaithwaite to witness a spectacular display from the Geminids, shooting stars everywhere - an interesting evening
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| Entrance to Doctor's Pot ? |
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