Gaping Ghyll

By Reginald Farrer.

(The subject of this article is of such special interest to Ramblers that we do not apologise for reprinting it, by kind permission, from Blackwood’s Magazine, July,1908.  Ed. Y.R.C.J.)

Above the placid valley of Craven, in the uttermost corner of Yorkshire, stand the three mountain-masses of Ingleborough, Penyghent, and Whernside.  Ingleborough holds the central position, and, thanks to his isolation, achieved long ago the reputation of being the highest point in England.  From Whernside on the one hand, and from Penyghent on the other, Ingleborough is cut off by two deep valleys, which form his basis into a vast rough triangle, of which one line is made by the infant Ribble, flowing beneath Penyghent, and the other by the Greta, perpetually disappearing underground, like Arethusa, as it makes its way down towards Ingleton.  The third side of the triangle, and the broadest, is the lowland of Craven itself, along which gently goes the Wenning in search of the Lune.

On this great triangle, as on a pedestal, stands the mass of Ingleborough, built, like his two neighbours, of shale and grit, with one narrow belt of mountain limestone appearing about a hundred feet from the summit in an abrupt cliff, on which grow the rare plants, for which the hill is celebrated, But the statue, like Flaubert’s Salammbo, is too small for its plinth: splendid as are the proportions of Ingleborough, the pavement of limestone spreads out far and wide beneath the last steep slopes of the gritstone giant himself, so that on surmounting the lower fells one finds oneself on a perfectly flat even floor of white boulders stretching away to the foot of the mountain.  And it is in this white pavement that are found all the famous water-sinks that feed the streams far below, in the unknown caverns through which they run.  For in his magnificent solitude Ingleborough gathers all the clouds of heaven, and their rains streaming down his slopes have so fretted away the limestone of the levels that, here and there, the waters disappear into some secret chink or narrow terrible shaft between the rocks.  It is practically certain that all these chasms ultimately have connection with the caves from which the rivers of Craven issue into the valleys far below at the cliff’s foot; but there now seems little hope that any practicable passage will ever be effected, or that, as was once hoped, the pot-holes and the caves will all be found part of one enormous system of caverns ramifying throughout the heart of Ingleborough.  So far as has been yet discovered, each water-sink conveys only its own stream, and never joins it with that from any other hole.  Rift Pot alone has been connected with Long Kin East, a modest little winding crack in the white limestone, a yard across or less, that drops nearly four hundred feet to the abyss beneath.  Round Long Kin East are gathered a little knot of immature pot-holes, twenty to thirty feet in depth or so, and filled with fern and lily-of-the valley, where the silence of the hills is only broken by the sluggish drip of water, draining away to unsuspected depths.  These open shafts, however, with their water-fluted walls of limestone, and their clear pools below, are mere bruta fulmina, beguiling obviousnesses in the labyrinth of death-traps.  For it is the unsuspected, meek looking cavities that hide real danger.  A tiny opening, an apparent rabbit-hole, will drop a stone, echoing dimly, three hundred feet or more; and Rift Pot itself, obviously an hour’s work for its explorers, and only four dozen yards or so in depth, gave full occupation for a day and a night, and carried the seekers four hundred feet down, in drop after drop.

With such deadly dimples the smiling face of the upper limestone is studded all over the base of Ingleborough, from the mild open holes above Weathercote, right round the western, southern, and eastern faces of the mountain, to the grim and aptly named Helln Pot, close above Selside.  But the deepest and the most awful of the water-holes is Gaping Ghyll.  The chasm comes upon one by surprise, and, unlike the others, does not disguise its horror.  Following the stream from its source high up on the eastern face of Ingleborough, its meanderings leads one at last to the lower sedge-clad levels of the moor, and there, after disappearing several times beneath its limestone bed, in the manner of the mountain streams, it ends abruptly in a deep, basin-shaped depression.  On three sides falls a steep bank of heather and moss; on the fourth, far down under the converging slopes, the stream disappears over a smooth white lip of rock into an open rounded well of darkness, up which floats a faint wraith of spume.  The shaft itself is dank and wet; a dull light shines from the rock, and strange livid lichens grow in lines and patches as far down as the last rays of daylight will permit.  Above, on the upper ledges, delicate ferns and wood anemone balance in the ascending reek of the pot-hole; and higher still, where the smooth slope above breaks sheer off in the precipice, hang the last tufts of heather and sedge and hawkweed that offer so delusive a handhold to any unwary victim of the bank.  And yet, horrible as the place is, deadly and evil beyond expression, it has absolutely no record of tragedy, – and, this too, though red-tape and manorial complications have always forbidden it to be railed in, and left it an open peril in the moor.  Further, Gaping Ghyll, for all its terrors, has no legend, no ghost, no supernatural reputation in the country-side.  About two miles away, in the narrow valley beneath the fells, the great Ingleborough Cave opens into the Ingleborough Woods, and from a subsidiary mouth flows that stream which, after feeding the lake above Ingleborough House, drops in a series of waterfalls towards the Craven lowlands, where it becomes the Wenning, and ultimately joins the Lune at Wennington on its way down to Lancaster and the sea.  And this stream which emerges from the cave under the cliff is, beyond doubt, the same that plunges into Gaping Ghyll on the moor five hundred feet and more above, and about two miles away.

It was thus known, long since, that of all the pot-holes, Gaping Ghyll was the one that held out the finest prospects of a big cave-system, and even of some practicable passage out into the daylight once more.  The first descent of the great Ghyll was made by M. Edmond Martel, the French spelæologist, who, with practised intrepidity, went down alone into the darkness, and after several hours returned with the news of an enormous hall beneath the main shaft.  He, however, found no outlet, from this hall, and it was left for the Yorkshire Ramblers in subsequent descents to discover passages leading from either end of it towards farther halls and corridors and abysses.

When I first gazed upon the frail-looking little rope-ladder that swayed and wobbled away out of sight beneath my feet, I was not disposed to flatter myself on prudence in having persuaded the Ramblers to let me accompany them on their latest exploration in the depths of Gaping Ghyll.  And when, from that vacillating Brig o’ Dread, a Rambler emerged once more into the upper air, wearied and wet, I found it necessary to take my determination into both hands and squeeze it vigorously back into firmness.  In point of fact, one cannot possibly be afraid, for there is nothing on earth to be afraid of.  For not only has one the rope-ladder to grip, but also a stalwart life-line, attached to one’s middle, with half a dozen equally stalwart Ramblers holding it firm on the bank above, lowering it step by step as you descend, and hauling with a will as you come up.  Thus it will be obvious that, even in the most timid, there is no room for any sort of fear.  For, unless all your pullers were simultaneously stricken with apoplexy, nothing could conceivably go wrong with you as long as you keep your head and your hold.  And yet, though one is in no sense afraid, there is an awe and a ghostly horror about that Avernus which sinks deep into one’s bones, while one lingers shivering on the brink, not yet wishing to launch away and go down out of the blessed daylight.  To save me fatigue the Ramblers started me from the lowest ledge of all; and thus, despite my protests, I was able – if I had chosen – to look down and see clearly to what I had committed myself.  However, I tried to see and think as little as possible, and so stood with my feet on the ladder, awaiting the signal.  The stream, dried with spring droughts, had been dammed off above with a bank of grass and stones, and this added a whimsical touch to the situation.  For my latest novel had concluded with the destruction of most of my characters in just such another pot-hole, by the rupture of just such another dam, while the heroine contemplated the situation with complacency.  I could not but feel with what a poetic justice some similar fate might befall me in my turn, and, as I began the descent, almost expected to see the well known phantom of Lady Gundred Darnley among the spectators on the bank above.

At last the signal came, and blindly I began to lower my feet from rung to rung of the ladder.  Of course the process was easy and pleasant.  Expected difficulties generally are.  So down I went, and down, and the daylight began to glimmer ghostly overhead with wild pale reflections from the gleaming rocks of the chasm.  Soon I had passed beneath the sphere of the last lichens, and only bare grey stone, glossy with cold moisture, shone around me while I descended as mechanically and rhythmically as possible.  For, if you keep step with the lowering movements of the life-line, your descent is rapid and easy as the descent to Avernus has every traditional right to be.  Unfortunately, however, the depth of the shaft is far too great to admit of a single rope-ladder serving the whole length.  Therefore many have to be spliced together, and, where these splices occur, the thickened twisted ropes are hard to seize for the hands that are rapidly becoming numbed with the deadly cold.  And so one gets out of step, and the earliest anguishes begin.  At this point it is that I make my first discovery.  I cannot blow the whistle.  Nothing but a feeble splutter results, like the pipe of a bird with a quinsy.  And on the whistle hangs all my happiness.  For the holders of the rope have a code of signals by which to regulate their movements.  One shrill with the whistle stands for “Stop”; two for “Haul up”; three for “Lower.” Now, if you cannot whistle you have no way of communicating your wishes to them, and when you want them to lower they cut your body piteously in two by hauling up, till your feet are pulled off the ladder and float wildly in the dark; and when you want them to haul up or let you rest, they lower, until the slack of the rope is bellying away below you, and you know that for a few minutes at least your only hope of safety is to hold fast to the ladder.  And this becomes no easy task, for the cold soon becomes so agonising that from the elbow downwards neither of your arms has any feeling whatever, and though you clutch, it is only automatically, without conviction or any real sensation of holding.

Suddenly, at this stage, the worst moment of all begins.  Hitherto the ladder has been descending against the sheer rock, and thus has been firm and good for the feet to grip.  But now the line of the shaft sags inwards, and the ladder hangs slack and independent for fifty feet or more, until the rock slopes outward again and supports it.  And the instant that the rope-ladder is left free it develops vagaries.  Before you know where you are, or have any idea beyond the passionate wish that you weren’t there, the ladder begins to gyrate, and suddenly swings round altogether.  In the paralysing unpleasantness of that moment one has to bend all one’s will to remember that nothing can possibly go wrong so long as one clings to that delusive ladder, – which, as a matter of fact, has, of course, not swung completely round, being too securely fastened, though its manoeuvres are quite as disconcerting as if it had.  Now it flops and staggers as you go, and the going becomes an agony.  To and fro it swings you, lurching this way and that, and at the same time falling sheer beneath you, except when your tread forces it outwards at some horrible angle.  The secret of negotiating these bad passages is, I am told, to hold on with the right hand to the right rope of the ladder, and to pass the left arm completely round the ladder till you grasp the right-hand rope with both hands.  For the closer you keep your body to the ladder the less it sways.  These are wise counsels; but unfortunately the ladder is just too wide for the crook of my arm to slide over its rungs with any ease, and how can any one execute manual manoeuvres on a jumping rope with hands that have long lost any power of sensation? And yet, though my mind does not know it, my hands are gripping the rope with a mechanical frenzy that soon, combined with the cold, threatens to produce writer’s cramp or some analogous complaint.  And still I descend with a sort of automatic passion, the light waning as I go, and the grey, wet darkness gathering thicker every moment.  A sound of many waters is in my ears.  Luckily, in all stresses of effort, the mind seems to hypnotise the body, and then to go off on a holiday, while the body continues blindly doing what the mind commanded before it departed.  So, as I go, dully clinging, dully descending, without stop or conscious action, my mind, confident in the body’s ability to grip a rope and find a rung, is roaming strange fields, and accompanying old blind Odipus down καταρρακτησ οδοσ in Kolonos.  Was it more καταρρακτησ than this? Poor Odipus ! No wonder he lingered till that ghostly voice called him to hasten.  Suddenly I awake to the knowledge of human propinquity.  Voices strike through the roar of the water.  I have arrived at the ledge.

For half-way, about a hundred and ninety feet down Gaping Ghyll, there exists the one amenity of the pot-hole, a broad triangular ledge of smooth water-worn limestone, on which, so broad it looks to my imagination, excited by the sight of level ground, one might almost give a dance.  And here two Ramblers are waiting to help me from the rope, and offer me a rest.  Indeed one needs helping from the ladder, for both my hands are absolutely paralysed by now, and incapable of force or feeling.  How I held on for the last fifty feet will always be my wonder.  It shows yet again what one can do when one must.  So I crawl on to the ledge and lie down under the shelf on one side of it, to be safe from any stones that may fall.  And now I know that my Odipus-preoccupied mind has really been at home and noticing all the time.  For that last fifty feet I have been descending the shaft with my back to the wall and my face turned outwards to the column of darkness down which I was going, and every detail is clear to me as I remember, – the rounded well, the grey glistering rocks, and the spume of water that fills all the air and rises for ever like a faint cloud.  And above everything, across the fluctuating, steaming darkness down between my feet, the white whirling apparition of the waterfall.  For out of an unsuspected opening in the wall comes roaring a great mass of water, the main body of the stream from up above, which, instead of descending as originally over the lip of the Ghyll itself, now has wormed its way among some big boulders at the pot’s mouth, and rejoins the main shaft about half-way down by a side-passage.

The Ledge, Gaping Ghyll by C. Hastings

The Stream-Chamber, Gaping Ghyll by C. Hastings

The Ramblers, I find, seem to think I have done enough, and should now be content to go tamely up again.  As if one had braved such toils in order to leave the job half done and the glory unattained! They represent to me the formidableness of the undertaking, and tell me that if I go down the whole way I shall probably be unable to come up again; to which I answer that when the only alternative is staying at the bottom of Gaping Ghyll for the rest of my natural life, they may rely on my getting up again somehow by hook or by crook.  There are very few things one cannot do if necessity offers no other choice.  And believing that one can always do what one has to do, I have a strong tendency to burn my boats and so make achievement certain.  Accordingly, after ten minutes on the ledge, I creep back on to the ladder again and continue my descent through the cataclysmal noise of the waterfall.

But the last part of the descent is far better than the first.  Though the cataract yells in your ear, and though the spray of it leaves you without a dry rag, yet the ladder is so hung that the volume of water does not harass you as you descend, and for about fifty feet of the hundred and fifty you have still to go the ropes hang firm and fixed on the face of the rock, so that one leaps down swiftly and surely, hand over hand.  They gave me whisky, too, on the ledge, and sensation accordingly has flowed painfully back into my limbs.  So I go cheerfully onwards, not heeding the difficulty which I have every moment in dragging my soaked sleeve over the projecting left rung of the ladder.  And then suddenly there is nothing in front of me but blind, black night, only made more dense by the pale light of the shaft above.  The rock has ceased utterly, and now the rope is falling sheer through the roof of the Great Hall at the bottom of Gaping Ghyll.  As one goes the sense of its awful vastness leans heavier and heavier on one’s consciousness.  Every step makes one more infinitesimal in the enormous primeval gloom of the cavern.  The strands of the rope dwindle, it seems, to a frail thread, and one feels like a spider spinning dizzily down from the Dome of St. Paul’s.  And the descent is incredibly long.  Very far away overhead now hangs the blackness of the roof, and very far away below one can dimly discern the gleaming rocks of the floor.  Thus one goes, and the rope, contrary to my expectations, has so proper a sense of the scene’s solemnity that it gyrates and jumps no longer, but continues soberly and straightly on its sheer way.  Then at last it seems that the rocks made a sudden leap upwards, and you are standing on solid earth again, nearly four hundred feet beneath the moor.

The Great Hall at the foot of Gaping Ghyll must be the original dwelling of Aiolos.  For all the winds are at home here, and a hundred conflicting eager draughts welcome one to the Underworld.  And a dim, awful world it is.  Feet and yards give no impression, even when numbered by hundreds.  But this cave is terrifyingly vast, – so high and so broad and so long.  The eye loses itself in the distance of darkness after darkness.  Almost in the middle, pale and ghastly, falls the daylight, in one round blotch of greyness.  And through the daylight, in an avalanche, falls the crashing whiteness of the waterfall, which, long before it touches earth, breaks like the Staubbach into a never-resting cloud of spume, drifting down in slow wraiths or breaking in little bombs of snowy smoke.  Its end is in a small pool, into which you can scarcely see it merge; only across the brown surface of the water sweeps for ever a whipping, shifting sheet of spray, perpetually varying from shape to shape, lashing the tormented shallows with the semblance of a hundred hurrying ghosts.  And then, impregnably high against the white cataract and the grey sky above, looms, ominously hard and sharp and black, the broken line of the roof, from which the ladder hangs, a tiny reminder of one’s own minuteness, leading up and up and up, unbelievably straight and far, towards the ledge.  The cave itself is so vast that even across the pool one man looks to another like a pismire, and, as he wanders back towards the glooms, almost shrinks from sight altogether.  Only under the shaft itself is there light.  The rest is velvety blackness.  The wall of the cave, though, as it skirts the waterfall, has small projecting buttresses that take the pale dusk, and by it are turned into phantoms.  Of less than human height they are, but vaguely human in shape, those blurs of greyness.  Sometimes they stand linked, as it were, arm in arm, and here and there alone – peering out suspiciously from the dark upon the invaders of their immemorial territory.  Under the spray of the fall, too, gleam shining pebbles in the bed of the pool, and round it, where the spume washes them.  The stream, however, is heard no more of, but sinks through the stone into unguessed profundities, so that the rest of the cave is dry and solid.  As one roams round its enormous area one comes upon a great sand-bank, flat and hard and even; but for the main part the floor is of rounded shingle or broken rock.

At the northern end, or that which leads up towards Ingleborough, the cavern narrows, and then is suddenly closed by a steep, high bank of débris.  Climbing this, one comes upon a needle’s eye between two cliffs, and so, straddling perilously out, with either foot on a precipice and nothing below, sees, far beneath, and stretching out indefinitely beyond, another cavern, floored with broken boulders.  Magnesium wire shows darkness beyond darkness, and possibility behind possibility.  But this passage, they say, is sterile, so we return towards the southern extremity of the Great Hall, whence lead on the corridors by which the Ramblers still hope that they may establish a connection between Gaping Ghyll and the Ingleborough Cave below, of whose system Gaping Ghyll has undoubtedly been a part at one time, and whose water, it is known, is still received from Gaping Ghyll.

Crossing the enormous length of the main chamber again, we come to the southern end.  Here, too, a towering rampart of broken, unstable boulders leads us upwards towards the outlet.  No wonder that Martel never suspected these exits, thus masked by hopeless-looking slopes of rubble.  All here is dry and warm.  It is many thousand years, in every probability, since water last flowed in these caverns.  A couple of bleached planks half-way up the bank shows the high-water mark of the heaviest floods, but into the passages themselves there is no doubt that water never flows now.  At last we delicately surmount the last toppling boulder and look back at the main chamber stretching far away below us, and away into the indefinite distance.  I can only compare the sight to some midnight view of a vast cathedral wrecked and pillaged, with pale moonbeams falling through a great rent in the dome.  And then we turn to the passage.  For a few yards it is a case of wriggling, of playing sandwich between a million-ton slab of rock above and the floor of the world beneath.  So, at last we writhe ourselves clear, and are standing in a long shallow corridor, triangular in shape, with the broadest side of the triangle sloping overhead in a slanting roof.  Candles are fixed in our hats, and shoot vain, vulgar, little reddish darts against the invulnerable darkness.  And all around us, now that the sleety whistle of the waterfall is left behind, broods an infinite silence.

Anemolites, Gaping Ghyll by C. Hastings

New Stalactite Chamber, Gaping Ghyll by C. Hastings

And so past city after city, past hanging after hanging, our corridor convoys us onward, now arched and lofty, now low and tortuous.  Underneath our feet are stretches of damp cave-mud or pebbles, and then, at last, great broken boulders, so long fallen that, though now they are dry, their surfaces are marbled and warted with an aged growth of stalagmite.  Then, between two mighty blocks, the way brings us out upon an embankment of earth, and beyond -nothing.  Even in the impenetrable night we can hear mysteriously that we are in some enormous holy place.  Very far away, from moment to moment, falls a drip of water, echoing and echoing along immeasurable depths.  Then a flare of magnesium stabs the blind void, and for an instant we see, and, seeing, know how much more we have to guess.  We are, as it were, in the gallery of a huge cathedral, the mud-rampart serving for our protecting ledge.  Below that, in slope after slope of mud, the ground drops sheer away so deep that no light can pierce it.  On either hand rise shadowy cliffs of darkness, frescoed here and there with white crusts of stalactite.  And high above all, unseen but divined, the shadowy weight of the vault hangs over us.  But this huge hall, with its shaft of unplumbed obscurity falling away beneath our feet, is but the chancel to more terrific transepts.  For far beyond, where the titanic walls end abruptly in the blackness, our flashes of magnesium show us another and a vaster cavern still stretching out at right angles, on either hand, to distances unguessed.  In the vacillating glow the remote vacancies waver and fade into night again.  No one speaks; and we hear at last the Great Silence – that crushing, fulminating silence which has been since the beginning of time, that must last to the unimaginable end.  For nothing has ever been here since the waters died away.  No living creature, man nor ancestor of man, nor even the wriggling things of the primal ooze, can ever have pierced this stronghold of quiet.  Bedded in the walls lie the sea-shells that lived while the world was building, but since their day nothing alive has ever had any share in this temple of wonder and terror.  In such a place one cannot speak.  There is no room for the voice of man.  And so, with the silence pressing heavily on our heels, we turn and make our way back again towards the Hall.

It had been my ambition to achieve the whole exploration with the explorers.  But they were evidently determined to have none of it, and represented to me that the passages would lead them on for two difficult hours to the subterranean pot-hole, which, so far, is the end of the Gaping Ghyll cave-system, and that once there it would be very many hours before they could hope to return, by which time they evidently concluded that I should be hors decombat; Therefore, having seen, like Balkis, such wondrous things that there was little more spirit in me, I yielded to their pleadings, and concluded that I would not make myself a nuisance by any insistence.  As it was, when I arrived at the base of the ladder and looked up that awful sheer ascent, only a few feet less than that Roman Catholic Cathedral’s tower by Ashley Gardens, I must admit I quailed before that rigid prospect.  However, there was no use for quailing, and as I had no choice but to climb, I set to work.  And the pullers above pulled with so excellent a will that I sailed up through that enormous dome again with unexpected ease, my only anguishes occurring when the thickening of the spliced ropes caused me to grope for hold, and thus lose step.  When this happened the hearty pullers jerked my feet from the ladder, and I spun agonising in the inane until I could scramble up a rung or two with my hands, and so get straight with my helpers again.  As before, though, it was the last slack bit of the ladder above the ledge that made my purgatory.  By the time I reached it my hands and my feet were so tired that they could but plod mechanically upward with occasional halts, especially as I was carrying over my shoulder nearly four hundred feet of loose guide-line that had been left below by mistake, and now had to be taken up to the top.  However, at last the blessed daylight began to grow clear, and, far sooner than I had ever dared to hope, I landed in the upper world once more, wet to the skin, as cold as a bone, bountifully scraped and bruised all over, weary in wrist and ankle, and with a large hole burned in the top of my head by the premature and unexpected guttering of the candle in my hat.  And yet, now that all was said and done, glorious with triumph, and prepared, if need be, to achieve it again; for had I not stood where few have stood, and where fewer still will ever stand again?  As for the explorers below, they made their perilous way onwards, I heard later, through crevice and cranny, up cliff and down abyss, carrying more ropes and ladders, together with provisions, until at last they reached the anticipated beginning of their real work.  And there, a mile or more from the base of Gaping Ghyll and about four hundred feet beneath the moor, they found that subterranean pot-hole, dropping another hundred and fifty feet towards the centre of the earth.  And in its depths lay a gulf of quiet water that no plummet could sound, though a fifty-foot lead was used.  Nor could any movement or outlet be anywhere discerned.  So there, in that pit of dead black water, immovable for ever in the depths of the earth, ends, so far as we yet know, the great cavern under Gaping Ghyll.