Ogof Pen Eryr - the day after the cave before

Jess recommended this small cave of only 420m length for me and Daz on Sunday, as she thought we would enjoy its squirrely nature. Mel joined us as she was looking for a short outing and an early bath to get back to West Mids for the evening.
It is basically a straight line, and obviously accessible to local kids judging by the graffiti (including direction arrows!) and glow stick that we spotted on our way in. It's also popular for novices, as it gives a taste of lots of different caving aspects on a mini scale. This means that the way is very smooth in many places, so easy to spot. Yet we all still found it extremely enjoyable.

Early on there is a challenging squeeze, which all three of us agreed was tighter than the infamous Daren Cilau entrance we had been through the previous day. The description told us to thrutch though it which we had a good laugh about as we had no idea what this meant. Whatever it was we had a damn good try and hopefully some thrutching was involved. Some parts were harder going up than down due to the lack of friction and gravity.

The Corkscrew was another nice twisty challenge about two thirds along the cave. At the far end a bedding plane is reached, and passing under this, near to a dig, and then up through some boulders takes you to the final chamber which was well decorated with calcite formations. They are all now completely brown apart from a few patches, but still cool. The cave feels snug overall.

We rested in the final chamber and turned off our lights for a good few minutes to experience what Mel called 'the true dark' together. After that, feeling happy, there was nothing left to do but to turn round and make our exit. This took us much less time than we expected and in something like 40 minutes we had reached the fresh air and the solitary sleeping bat at the cave entrance.

Photo of formations in Pen Eryr by Becca

Trip report: Becca

Present: Becca, Daz and Mel