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S**t!  You mean I have to fit through there!

Two years ago, if we had been sitting enjoying a pint in some remote highland boots bar and someone had posed the question:  “So, who fancies a spot of caving tomorrow?” I would most likely have spluttered into my ale, thrust an ice axe into this dangerously unhinged individual’s hand and marched them post-haste up the nearest mountain in the hope that the cold air, spindrift and altitude would shake them out of the temporary insanity that apparently threatened to consume them.  However, time can be a tricky travelling companion and over the last 12 months I have become increasingly preoccupied with two questions:

1:  Exactly how I can turn my persistent failure to put on weight into some kind of applied advantage, and;

2:  What is it precisely that draws my officemate away from the sun’s comforting smile every weekend and compels him to spend as much time as possible down wet holes.

So, with these questions burning in my head I recently looked up the date, time and venue of the next Aberystwyth Caving Club social rendezvous and duly ambled along to Aber’s Fountain Inn that Tuesday to rub shoulders with these strange burrowing types.

5 hours, many beers and a great evening later someone posed that fabled question:  “So, who fancies a spot of caving on Friday?  None of that fresher’s stuff, but proper caving!”  The place: Mendip.  The digs:  Belfy.  Of course, feeling well on my game after the evening’s revelries, and convinced after 10 years of mountaineering that I could hack anything the Earth’s bowels could throw at me, I piped up in support of this idea.  My how times have changed!  The next morning I woke up feeling a little like I had just volunteered for the gas chamber.

Fast forward 2 days and I was standing in a mist shrouded hollow, somewhere in the Mendip, helmet on, dressed in my ex-German Panzer Corps coveralls and staring into a disturbingly small-looking hole in the ground.  Things suddenly seemed very real.

It was too late now of course, and I was reminded of previous experiences at sea; like when you set off to sail across an ocean and see the continental shelf drop away below you on the depth sounder.  Something in your stomach seems to implode and your mind seizes up like a fist.  It’s now a matter of simply ‘do’.  So, I prostrated myself with the best of them and willingly slid headfirst into the wet and muddy-looking jaws of seemingly inevitable and impending madness.

I think I had subconsciously imagined spacious caverns, well rounded surfaces, shallow rivulets and plenty of headroom.  ‘Digs’, which my officemate seemed to attend quite regularly, had always painted an image of cultured gents standing in a field, shovel-in-hand, smoking a pipe and occasionally shifting a bladefull of sod in the hope that perhaps the ground would open up and reveal an ancient cavern resplendent with jewels and wonders as yet un-spoiled by the gaze of men.  So, you can imagine my repressed horror when I was casually introduced to my first crawl-through.  Of course when I say ‘introduced’, I mean that the bloke in front of me simply lay down at what appeared to my uninitiated eyes as a dead end, and vanished into the rock.  And I was expected to do this too!!!!  Ach well…  In for a penny in for a pound!  I lay down, thought of Scotland and squirmed my way forwards on trust alone.  And it worked!  It turned out that my stubbornly meatless frame is an advantage in some walks of life after all!  Ok, so bruising is to be expected, and I did have a moment of Hardyesqe ‘this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!’ when my head torch turned it’s-self off mid constriction, but all in all I felt great after my first proper squeeze and found myself actively hoping that the next passageway would funnel down to yet another wormway where I could try putting myself into increasingly uncomfortable places!

Even my first sump has a warm fuzzy place in my memory!  Throughout the approach my fellow gentlemen cavers had remarked with comic derision that Jack Ozbourne had backed out of this particular challenge.  I had responded by forcing a smile and chuckling through teeth that secretly clenched in trepidation, thinking, ‘I’ll reserve judgement until we see how I react’.  However, despite another moment of:  “Jumping geography!  Why on Earth am I doing this?  Always listen to mother!” which struck as the cold and completely opaque water entered my Panzer Corps overalls, I actually found the sump to be surprisingly relaxing!  Once you are underwater and you know there is no easy way back, it’s quite liberating to just glide onwards, face up, completely removed from all other worldly concerns other than the issue of ‘exactly how long did Henry say this sump was again?’

So, with newfound confidence in my ability to A; bury myself with confidence and B; voluntarily drown myself with the aim of hopefully finding another opportunity to bury myself in the next chamber, I skipped (well, slithered and crawled really) onwards through my first cave, discovering a whole new meaning to the word ‘muddy’ in the process.

Caving!  I love it!  Choose life!  Choose mud!  Choose claustrophobia!  Choose putting yourself in a compromising situation that most would associate with some kind of self-harming disorder.  Choose excellent, team-oriented, like-minded people.  Choose to be soaking wet, emerging into the rain and failing light, getting changed by the side of the road and having a good pint of warming ale in a proper country bar at the end of it all.  Choose knowing that you have spent your weekend doing something truly different and seeing the world from a completely new angle.  Choose caving! I have.

Colin Souness