Cave : Slaughter Stream Cave
Date : January 2001
Speleologists : Martin Beale (HPCC), Dave Grosvenor (HPCC), Roy Stone Sellman (HPCC)
Style : ladders and stream passage
Grade : 3
Equipment : 2 * 10m ladders, 40m lifeline, 10m lifeline, various maillons, pulleys etc.
Cave time : 3 hours
Approach time : 10m
Quality : ***

Getting to Slaughter Stream Cave itself proved to be very trying. Things went reasonably out of Bristol and over to Chepstow. Things got gnarly once we entered the Forest of Dean. The main Wye Valley road to Redbrook was closed and we had to take the Coleford road instead. This would normally be OK, but it was really cold and there was the ever present danger of black ice (the frozen ground was partly the reason why we were going to Slaughter Stream in the first place). The stretch from Clearwell to Redbrook was particularly exciting driving in the conditions.

After what seemed like an age, we were finally there. Another eternity passed as Dave and Roy Stone messed around with various inoperative lighting systems. I packed ropes into bags as the other two messed around. About 2 hours after leaving Bristol, we were finally yomping across the field to the cave.

Dave and Roy Stone are very experienced with opening gates. Having the key made getting through this particular gate easier for them. The entrance shafts to Slaughter are a real work of art. The engineering hereabouts is a tribute to the mining heritage of the Forest. There was a particularly impressive ladder that curved down 40ft into a chamber. A couple of crawls through shored up sections led from here to the top of the pitches.

The first pitch is perhaps only 4m high. We put a ladder on this, though this wasn't actually necessary. Once we'd been down, we found this pitch easily free climbable - there are both big handholds and good footholds. Indeed, Roy Stone removed the ladder before coming down last. We needed the ladder for the big drop. The big drop must be around 50ft deep. It is on permanent loan from Yorkshire. It even has P-bolts for the hang / lifeline. The P-bolts didn't seem to be in quite the right place for SRT. If this pitch were to be SRT-ed, it might be useful to take a rope protector along just in case (or prepare to get creative with deviations!). Dave joined the two 10m ladders and lowered them down the shaft. The descent of the ladders was brilliant. The sculpted walls of the shaft move further away from the ladders as depth is gained until you drop onto the floor of the chamber. You get showered with a little water on the way down, but it is by no means unpleasant.

The floor of the shaft is mainly flat, but slopes steeply on one side. A careful climb down this slope is followed by a crawl and some thrutching until the main stream is reached. The main stream is a bit of shock when it is reached. Beforehand, the cave had been fairly dry and now we were standing in a thundering stream passage - it was like being in Yorkshire (we seemed to be a million miles from Mendip).

We sploshed upstream for a while. After some dead ends, we arrived at the impressive Zurree Aven. The great feature of Zurree Aven is the 18m waterfall / cascade at the end. This is eminently climbable with care. You can bridge around the sides of the water with the water thundering down through your legs. At times you have to commit and accept the full force of the water. There was a ledge half way up and then the fun recommenced. This is probably the best bit of stream passage I have been in.

The route from the top of Zurree Aven I only remember as a blur. The bit I didn't really understand was that at one stage I was walking along a passage towards a stream. The stream was in a major cross passage. For some reason, this wasn't the way on : we were to follow dry passages instead. Dave seemed to know where he was heading for, but it made little sense to me. We seemed to pass a selection of small gnome like stalagmites a few times. Maybe we were going round and round in circles. A feature I found quite bizarre was a skeleton of a cat sized animal that was taped off at the side of the passage. I couldn't work out how this animal had found it's why in here. It must have been a fairly miserable place to get lost even for a cat. When Dave decided that we were actually "lost", the skeleton proved to be a really useful landmark - this was clearly the Graveyard.

There were some quite large passages upstream from here. The passages seemed to get larger and larger until we were walking in The Chunnel - a passage about 10m wide. There was quite a bit of tape around here. This made navigation really easy, though it wasn't clear what was being protected. We were looking for a little passage off the left side of the Chunnel in order to complete the round trip. We seemed to take the second significant passage off the left side of the Chunnel. This passed through a couple of boulder chokes with squeezes. We descended in both the boulder chokes.

Coal Seam Passage starts off with crawling just after the second boulder choke. After climbing over a few breakdown sections, the passage got larger and we were able to start making swift walking progress along a dry passage. The coal seam was not much in evidence, but I'll pay more attention next time. Maybe the seam is very thinly bedded indeed. Slaughter Stream cave has some very interesting rock in it. In places, there are wafer thin black razors sticking out of the walls. Other parts of the cave have well sculpted walls. The geology around here is obviously of interest.

Coal Seam Passage ends at a T-junction near the main stream. We went left back towards the entrance. We walked and crawled through both wet and dry sections. The water level must have been quite high a month previously. There were sections of dry passage with really wet sticky mud in them. Thankfully we didn't need to do any flat out crawling in this mud, but we got thoroughly filthy nonetheless. The wet sections were pretty good as we were walking in the main stream itself. The stream gets quite deep in places and you can make careful progress feeling your way along with your feet with your hands on the massive jugs formed by the fluted walls. It was obvious from this section of passage that a trip to the lower reaches of the cave would be very worthwhile.

Dave and Roy Stone were paying more attention than I was as they recognised the crawl back to the pitches. I might have gone round for a second time if they hadn't been on the ball! Ascending the pitches was fine. The main ladder pitch was spectacular of course. I was impressed with the speed at which Dave muscled up this. I don't think Dave was that impressed with my ladder packing technique. I clearly have room to improve here. When it was clear that I was getting nowhere, I let Dave loose on it - he is more experienced in these old school techniques than I am. SRT forever!

We got out of the cave at midnight. Even the Forest pubs are closed at this hour. We got changed in the freezing cold and then started the long trip back to Bristol. These Forest of Dean trips are going to get much easier when they have mended the A466 - or we could just commit to Ban y Gor cave!