I’d come to the Yorkshire Dales specifically for the Gaping Gill Winch Meet which happened just twice a year, once in May and once in August. Gaping Gill is a cave in the north western part of the Yorkshire Dales with the 100m Fell Beck, the highest unbroken waterfall in Britain inside it. However, most people don’t get to see this waterfall because it’s inside a cave and access is restricted. You can only go in the cave if you’re an experienced potholer, the general public aren’t allowed in. Except, that is, twice a year during the winch meet when around 2,000 people get to be lowered into the cave to see this wondrous, extensive underground cavern, the biggest in Britain.
You have to be serious about wanting to see the cave because the access isn’t exactly easy. The nearest village is a 90 minute walk away and we’re not talking a gentle woodland stroll either, some of it is quite challenging terrain. But it’s nothing that isn’t manageable if you’re careful and take your time.
At first, I was planning to do this adventure on my own, but after the success of our long weekend in Snowdonia last year, I asked my niece and nephew to join me as their birthday treat. My niece, Megan, turned 22 back in April, but Tuesday when we were making our way through the Yorkshire Dales up to Clapham village where we would be staying overnight before the winch meet, that was my nephew Dylan’s 19th birthday. After overnighting in the village we’d walk to the cave on Wednesday.
It’s not possible to make a reservation for the winch meet at Gaping Gill. You turn up, register and wait. They can only winch so many people into the cave each hour, get there late and you have either a long wait or worse, the capacity for the day has been reached and you can’t get into the cave at all. And it’s a long way to walk for nothing. I asked advice at the bed and breakfast where we were staying and was told that on Monday some guests had left at 8.30am and got to the cave at 10am and had to wait 2 hours. On Tuesday the guests had left at 7am, got to the cave at 8.30am and had to wait 45 minutes. They didn’t actually start operating the winch until 9am, so I decided to aim to set off at 7.30am and hope for the best!
It was a nuisance dragging out of bed at 6.30am, but I knew we’d regret setting off too late, so I made sure Megan and Dylan were awake and out of bed, we had a light breakfast, I put bottles of water and waterproofs in my rucksack and we were ready to go.
The first part of the walk is easy, wide path through the wood, slightly uphill, but not a problem. It took around half an hour to walk to Ingleborough Cave and Dylan thought we were there already. It is part of the same cave system, although this fact wasn’t discovered until 1983, but Ingleborough Cave is a show cave that is open year round, not the one we were going to be lowered into. It was another hour to walk from here.
We passed a few of the iconic Yorkshire Dales Swaledale breed of sheep with their curly horns, the emblem of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. The path was still wide and relatively flat at that point. And then it started to get more difficult. The path was narrower and slightly steeper and it started to rain making the stones wet and slippery. There were quite a lot of puddles and muddy parts of the path to negotiate too.
Then ahead of us, the gorge of Trow Gill and a steep, narrow path through the centre of it. Megan looked at it and said was that where the trail went. I wasn’t sure, but on closer inspection I realised there was no other way through. Megan was not happy about having to climb up there, she’d dodged the steeper paths the day before. I said we had to go that way to get to the cave. Megan had no need to worry; she leapt up that path like a mountain goat! Dylan is very tall with long legs and had no trouble either. It was poor old Auntie Hayley, more than 20 years older, with shorter legs and carrying the rucksack that was struggling! But I made it. Going up is generally not too much of an issue provided the steps aren’t too deep for my little legs. Coming down is always the scarier prospect for me. But I’d worry about that later. For now we were at the top and on our way.
It was warm work walking this trail, I’d taken my waterproof jacket off earlier and when it began to drizzle slightly, it was quite welcome, cooling me down nicely. But then the rain started to come down a lot harder, not only making me very wet, but also making the path muddier and the stones more slippery. I put my waterproof back on and put my hood up. I didn’t say anything to Megan and Dylan, but when it started to rain quite hard I was a little concerned because I knew that they suspended the winching into the cave when it rained. If the winch meet was cancelled either a notice went up at Ingleborough Cave (which we’d already passed) or the potholing club who ran the winch meet posted something on Facebook or Twitter. There was no mobile service out here, in the middle of nowhere. So once you were past Ingleborough Cave it was the point of no return and you just had to hope that conditions wouldn’t deteriorate so rapidly in the space of the next hour that you’d done that hike to the Gaping Gill for nothing.
Thankfully as we walked further, the rain did ease off making me more hopeful that they would still be operating the winch by the time we arrived. We came to a style and a sign on the wall saying Gaping Gill was now just a quarter of a mile away and once at the top of the nearby ridge, the tents that had been set up for the week long winch meet were in sight. It was still raining, but as we approached the registration tent we were handed a form to complete and told it was about an hour to wait to go down into the cave. Thank God they hadn’t cancelled it!
We went to wait in the beer tent where planks of wood had been laid across beer barrels so there was somewhere to sit. You could smell the beer, but none was available for consumption, at least not at this time in the morning. It was about 9.10am by now and we were numbers 21 to 23, so there weren’t too many people who had arrived ahead of us. A few minutes later numbers 16 and 17 were called, so I was optimistic we wouldn’t have too long to wait. I had certainly made the right decision leaving at 7.30am because in the next half hour a lot of people turned up. Had we been much later, we would have had a much longer wait. As it was, before 10 o’clock one of the potholing club staff came to the beer tent and called numbers 18 to 23, they were ready to lower us into the cave!
We got kitted up in hard hats, I’d already put my waterproof trousers on while waiting in the beer tent, we were ready! As I waited for my turn I chatted to the man taking our wrist band numbers so he had a record of who went down and could also therefore check we had come back up again! He said the weekend hadn’t been that busy, but Monday and Tuesday had been busier than expected. He told me around 160 people went into the cave each day.
In order to be lowered into the cave I had to sit in a yellow chair, lean back, I was strapped in, instructed to keep my arms in and legs tucked under and enjoy the view on the way down and they started the winch up.
It went a lot faster than I expected, I was really motoring. The descent is 105m, so it is a long way down! A waterfall was pouring from the main shaft entrance to the cave and I was lowered down through the waterfall! It was a great view going down; I was looking around in every direction, amazed at travelling through the waterfall and then when I got to the floor of cave, I saw more waterfalls.
It did occur to me that you go down into the cave through the waterfall, so I wasn’t sure why they stopped operating the winch when it was raining, you got wet anyway! It would only be if the cave was flooded there would be an issue.
You don’t get the impression of how high the waterfalls really are because the cavern is just so big. You wouldn’t guess Fell Beck is the highest single leap waterfall in Britain because of the loss of perspective of height inside the enormous cavern. The main chamber of Gaping Gill is the largest natural underground chamber in Britain and it’s the size of York Minster. And the main shaft of the Gaping Gill is the deepest open pothole in Britain. A lot of superlatives for this cavern in the Yorkshire Dales! Makes me very proud to be a Yorkshire lass!
I waited for Megan and Dylan to be lowered into the cave, we were given an information sheet and a torch and then we were free to explore the cavern floor. There were lots of passages out of the cavern as part of this vast cave system, but we were told not to go crawling through any of them, there were 10 miles to search for us if we went missing!
I went right round the edge of the cavern and took photos of the waterfalls and the rocks. The floor of the main chamber is composed of around 70 feet of rubble. The North Passage is a large tunnel filled with glacial material from the last Ice Age. This section is still being explored in the hope that more passages of the Gaping Gill cave system will be discovered.
It was quite dark, and other than the waterfalls, there wasn’t that much to see down there, the cave formations were much further away and only accessible by crawling through dark passages which we were not allowed to do. You could easily make out the fault line that ran across the cavern, a lot of the passages are above the fault line, a reason it took so long to find the cave system below. We had some fun trying to take a photo of our shadows against the cave wall! Megan and Dylan didn’t seem quite as interested in the cave as I was, but they had a wander round.
You can stay in the cavern as long as you want, there is no time limit, but when you can’t go adventure caving, there is only so much time you can spend looking at a big underground chamber and its waterfalls, so after around 45 minutes we went back up to the surface. The joke at the winch meet is, it’s free to be winched down into the cave, you just have to pay to be winched back out again. Otherwise it’s a long crawl through the underground tunnels in the dark to get to an exit or a cold swim through to Ingleborough Cave! Definitely worth paying the fee for the winch!
Megan and Dylan probably enjoyed the winch up and down into the cave more than the cave itself; that was incredibly good fun.
I love caves and have been in lots of caves all over the world, so for me it was a bit more special. The privilege of seeing this enormous cavern, the largest in Britain, and Fell Beck, the highest single drop waterfall in Britain, which very few people get to see, was well worth the long hike. The waterfalls, in particular, fascinated me. But all caves fascinate me and I will go out of my way to visit them.
So now, the 90 minute walk back to the village and to my car. Megan and Dylan took off in front which was fine. They walk faster than I do, they’re a lot younger than me and have much longer legs than I have. So I just took my time and let them gallop on ahead.
I want to travel to Patagonia in the next 18 months and hike the W Trail in Torres del Paine National Park, which is 5 days through mountainous terrain. I did wonder as I was battling along this hiking trail in the Yorkshire Dales, if I was struggling here, how was I going to manage a 5 day mountain hike in Patagonia? The simple answer – I wasn’t! Not without some serious training. But that’s another post.
I got to the part I’d been dreading, the steep descent through the gorge. The rain had left the rocks wet and as slippery as ice. I held on where I could and took it one step at a time. No point rushing and falling and breaking my ankle. It was a long way for someone to carry me out of there and that was the last thing I wanted. I managed. There was no one behind me telling me to hurry up, I let anyone behind me come past and waited in a safe spot for anyone climbing up.
I finally caught up with Megan and Dylan at Ingleborough Cave where they’d stopped to have a drink. As Ingleborough Cave is a half hour walk from Clapham village and we probably wouldn’t be out this way again for some considerable time, if ever, I asked Megan and Dylan if they’d like to go in the cave while we were here. Ingleborough Cave is completely different to Gaping Gill, no being lowered in on a winch; it was a concrete path all the way, there weren’t even any steps. Megan was unsure about it, but we convinced her that this would be nothing compared to Gaping Gill.
It was an interesting cave, but it didn’t have a lot in the way of amazing formations. There was a beautiful archway formation and quite spectacular Manhattan skyline which was a series of small stalactites reflected in a pool. Megan did get a bit claustrophobic in one part of the cave where the roof was low and the path narrowed and I made a mental note that Megan is not going to be up for any adventure caving where she has to crawl through low passages and squeeze through narrow openings on any future trips. I’ll leave further adventure caving for when I’m travelling on my own.
After Ingleborough Show Cave, it was an easy half hour walk to get back to Clapham Village and we made a final quick stop by the side of the river to view Clapham Waterfall before heading back to the car. Our caving adventure in the Yorkshire Dales had ended.
Gaping Gill is in the north western part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park
Craven Pothole Club holds a winch meet at Gaping Gill each year in the week leading up to August Bank Holiday. We joined this winch meet in August 2017. The fee for the winch is £15 per person.
There is a fee for the hiking trail from Clapham Village to Ingleborough Cave which is currently £1 per adult.
We stayed in Clapham Village at Bridge Cottage B&B which has 4 ensuite rooms. Full breakfast and tea and cakes on arrival were included in the room rate.
Bradford Pothole Club also holds a winch meet at Gaping Gill each year at the end of May.
For more adventure ideas in England, check out these posts.
Norfolk: Hiking the Pingo Trail
Wiltshire: Longleat Festival of Light
Read about when I didn’t have such a great experience in a cave in Georgia and the bizarre events that followed.
Reporting a Theft – A Cautionary Tale
