Bruno Kranski’s –
3 Counties Link
Have you ever been
cursed? – I have. For two and a half years I had the curse of Bruno Kranski giving me mental and physical pain and an
obsession. Let me explain:-
Bruno Kranski’s is the arse end of Notts II. Near it was
the arse end of Lost Johns/Easegill. Like an arse, both were filled with crap. The long constipated
passage needed removal of its brown mucky lumps to engineer the link
that would defeat the Welsh at being UK’s longest cave and, also linking the three counties of Cumbria,
Lancashire and Yorkshire.
This for me and Bill was the “final” effort. We were sick
of the place, having not just gone in over a hundred times but having been to
some quite disgusting places including shoving a maiden up the far end of ‘Cordingley’s Bowel’ – the original name for Green Tape
Inlet. I mention that as the following week (having
written that off) we took her to Bruno Kranski
with the Earby pump. A feeling of doom came over me
and Bill that something could go wrong so we were glad to have a fit tigress who could help us out. Little did we know! …
Well it didn’t help that things did not go to plan – pump
assembly, lost screwdriver, water all over the place, mainly on her. Does it
matter? No it doesn’t. She’s got a “wet, wet suit”. No. It can’t be wet and
draughty. We selfishly ignored her wish for an early night and she ended up
feeling very ill. Oh dear!!
Bruno Kranski’s sump had been
opened and capped years before by Paul Parker, Alan Speight and others to pre
test a pump, gaining a small extension to a huge choke under a surface crater.
However we now believed its water went to Lost Johns. As well as digging a
drainage trench we would follow the water.
Now 1999 we could sluice the water using the Earby pump which quickly shifted enough water to save the
Titanic, although due to stupidity it took three trips to assemble properly.
This did not totally remove the squalor – it usually rained the day after it
was pumped out. It was at best a duck you did on your back without getting
stuck in mud, but the mud still went down yours ears and down your neck. Still
there was also Lyle Cavern in Lost Johns nearby, twenty metres above us – no
chance – but beer, dreams, and hopeful logic made it “almost” level. This lead to an optimistic but successful smoke test to Lyle
Cavern, Lost Johns.
Roll on weeks later and twenty six more trips and we were now
on dig 4 in the area!! We were sick of the place and a now shattered (capped)
bulge meant we would be into impossible and suicidal crap and failure!
I stood on the moor in blackness waiting for Bill or Hugh
to appear when a group of tourists from
The dig now went uphill which aided rock removal except in
one case where a young Prestonian got his geometry
wrong (due to do GCSE’s!)
and sealed them in! Eventually they were unsealed by a fourteen pound
hammer plus Bill thinking about work. Tim gave us a nice Christmas present by
removing the rock by Bruno Kranski’s sump so we no
longer got stuck going in or out. However the mud in the dig generally
splattered into faces, eyes and open gobs but I was OK (having glasses) until forced to take my glasses off, then being blinded
by the next splatter. I then had to exit semi blind until I was able to wash in
the main stream. Try climbing down a rope with your glasses in your teeth, or
worse realizing you’d left them back in a mud bank!!
Around this time others connected Ireby/Notts
to Rift/ Large. ie: over the Lancashire Yorkshire
border the theoretically impossible link – and we had a smoke test link to Lost
Johns/Easegill, hence the Three Counties link, a dream of forty years now
proved. This started a media “frenzy”.
The Lancashire Yorkshire link was ‘Big’ news on TV and
radio but our smoke test was awkwardly incomplete idea ie:
a not yet done link. It did make a good tale and it was the crazy name of
“Misty Mountain Mud Miners” (a mixed club
co-op) and digging into things when at the same time world news was of
Chilean miners trying to dig out, plus an obvious lack of other major news, sex
scandals etc. The link was there but were the cavers ever going to do the link?
We now had a radio location of twenty metres plus distant
sound but Bruno was having none of this and bit back. Despite care we had two
or three nasty incidents, followed by much more hopeful prospects above us. One
passage towards Gavel, one towards Lost Johns wide open, Shuttleworth
Pot opened and the NCC playing with fire hoses at chokes nearby – the race was
on.
Meanwhile our dig was going straight up into chaos, weeks spent arranging and rearranging scaffold.
During this time I plastered the roof and walls with cement to at least
preserve it for the next century. However we did make progress up two climbs –
one called Blood gulch to a rocky maze, except
each ‘passage’ was inches wide and we lost it – we got a horrid dig going
downhill in more ways than one! The draught went into an
‘un-diggable’ bit where serious spoil or a collapse
would seal you in. Also the correct way on seemed barred at right angles by a
rock wall. Nearby we found a way upward that needed and got, a serious scaffold
cage with just
bricks needing poking out. This was done by Hugh St.Lawrence
protected by some scaffold and a sheet of aluminum as a shield, poking out
bricks with a bar – just like St. George. He made strange noises of fear,
followed by tremendous crashes and then a deadly silence during which we
removed rocks from his feet in case of the need of a quick exit. This was
followed by more rock which he tipped from his shield. Partly due to the time
of year and the crap that fell down this was named Queens Chamber Pot.
October 2011 – We got up Queens Chamber Pot into
an odd area that went back on itself. We were now twenty two metres above Bruno
Kranski. ie: Seventy foot,
and two hundred foot in, so now we had to manhandle rocks all the way - three
hundred feet or so into stacking space. This was OK for the first two hundred
foot as they rolled at speed to each person who then moved on a bit, but the
last hundred foot was by drag tray. Also a huge flood
meant some bad damage, before cementing etc. could it get it worse? Yes it
could. The radio location showed we were eight metres too high and now the
draught could not be followed as it went everywhere. What with a bad cold,
horrible weather and the cat dying I was at a new low.
Meanwhile in Lost Johns they had also ‘gone’ over sixty
metres and we could here their knocking but they couldn’t get in and they were
in a rocky maze. We dusted ourselves down and carried on throwing a bit more
thought and technology at it. ie:
surveyed it! We had in both digs ‘followed’ a rock wall, in one dig on the
left, in the other on the right but no connection point appeared. It appeared
to be at right angles the wrong way, but on surveying, it was in the same
direction but the twisting and corkscrewing up the dig confuses your sense of
direction.
A sound test went wrong in Notts
as the person in front was deaf and the person in the middle would not shut up
and Bill kept shouting for him to shut up. The Lost Johns lot could hear them
anyway! Still they could be twenty foot in any direction. Possibly for the
first time a radio locator and receiver was taken in and the direction and
distance roughly done – not helped by the scaffold at both ends acting as a
giant bar magnet!
November 6th: A link at last done and the Lost
Johns team exited by Notts II! More TV and radio plus
the press! Thanks go to the more than fifty people on the dig and the hundreds
of individuals who had opened and linked other parts of the Thee Counties
System over the last hundred years.
The Three Counties
System comprises:-
Longest in the
Deepest in
12th longest in the World
3rd longest in
The system links
three counties, and possibly also Barbondale and Kingsdale.
Bruno Kranski dig was 70 metres long on the Notts
II side and 22 metres high to the connection point. Total dig length was 140 metres.
And most important of all:-
Me, Bill Sherrington,
Pete Hall, Hugh St.Lawrence Dave, the
Andy Walsh
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