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Adventures Underground 2nd edition cover

Adventures Underground 2nd edition upright book

Adventures Underground 2nd edition open book

Adventures Underground Contents (Word doc)

Adventures Underground Contents (PDF)

Adventures Underground Index (Word doc)

Adventures Underground Index (PDF)

Adventures Underground

Increasingly, books recounting exploration of Britain’s limestone caves and potholes appear on shop bookshelves, promoting a maturity of attitude toward the pursuit of speleology that lurid press reactions to occasional rescues in the mid-20th Century had stifled and mis-informed. Although all accounts are praiseworthy, very few have attained the relaxed yet magisterial style of Adventures Underground. First published in 2017, this fine text sought to bring up to date the explorations detailed in Gemmell and Myers’ Underground Adventure (1952), arguably the seminal text stimulating generations of skilled Yorkshire potholers, while successfully retaining the same format and approach. In the interim only one other book attempted such a hommage, David Heap’s Potholing. Beneath the Northern Pennines (1964), now long out of print.

 

Admirably written by Dave Haigh and John Cordingley, Adventures Underground covered every aspect of Yorkshire potholing, most importantly giving context to new explorations and how they fit into the bigger picture. Rapidly running out of print – which tells its own story of how popular the book was – led to this revised edition which has been thoroughly updated and expanded. Necessarily, now that most obvious cave entrances have long been investigated, digging away glacial blockages and/or pursuing underwater tunnels have become the only ways to reveal new territory, meaning an element of risk is undeniable and neither author shrinks from ‘telling it as it is’ boldly describing ‘hairy’ experiences with honesty and humour.  Indeed, it is the delightfully readable first-hand accounts that provide pleasure and astonishment in equal proportions. Everything is illustrated with a multitude of first-class photographs and clear, easy to follow cave surveys. No one can possibly read this book without developing a deep respect for cutting-edge explorations that in a future world will maybe, just maybe, result in an almost unbelievable Trans-Craven cave network reaching from western Cumbria to Nidderdale’s Coniston Moor in the east.

 

This book is easy reading, highly enjoyable, very informative and, as I stated in my 2017 review, a work you simply cannot be without. It is saturated with the easy camaraderie enjoyed by every caver who has participated in entering territory where no human has ever been before. A landmark achievement in British geographical writing and, in short, quite definitely the best caving narrative in fifty years of British speleology.

 

Alan L. Jeffreys

Adventures Underground

Local caver John Cordingley has teamed up again with the Bradford Pothole Club’s Dave Haigh to publish a second edition of their book, Adventures Underground. The first edition, published in 2017, set out to emulate the seminal book written by Arthur Gemmell and Jack Myers back in the early 1950s, and which inspired the generations of cave explorers that followed. It told the tale not of the caves themselves but of the way they were first explored – the thrill and adventure of finding something new and the work to understand how those new discoveries fitted in with what was already known and with the landscape in general. John and Dave’s new volume does that too – opening the eyes of both caver and non-caver alike to what its like to break through into brand new passages and chambers for the first time: to be the very first human to see what secrets they hold. And for the non-caver there is the added advantage that you can join in without getting cold, wet and covered in mud, without falling through a floor which gives way when you stand on it, and without having to avoid the hanging death of loose boulders above your head. Neither do you need breathing apparatus.

The new edition brings us up to date with the discoveries of the last seven years, with some wholly new chapters and others updated: the things individuals did to amuse themselves during lockdown included. Plus, all the royalties from the book are going to two local charities – the CRO and the Settle Area Swimming Pool.

The new edition will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about our local landscape, and the sense of adventure will be apparent whether you are a caver or not. No-one knows how much cave there is, hidden, under our local hills – there will be miles and miles of cave, possibly even hundreds of miles of cave, still to find. To give just two local examples: although Gaping Gill and Ingleborough Cave were joined fifty years or so back in 1983 (the connection passage has since collapsed), to date, still no one has managed to follow the whole route of the water from the main chamber to where it reappears in the lakes beyond the end of the show cave. And the ‘other’ cave in Clapdale – Moses Well – remains almost completely unexplored despite being thought to carry almost all the water from much of Ingleborough’s southern slopes. Long may the adventure of exploration continue!

Yorkie
First published in the Clapham and District Newsletter (153), February 2025 and reproduced here by kind permission

 

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