Re: Estimating water quality

In article <125fpskbgc37eed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jo Schaper wrote:
Hmmm. Water can travel under valleys in karst. No problem. Karst doesn't
necessarily cling to the surface drainages. If you've had a bunch of
dung dumped nearby, that might explain the algae nicely.

There's a part of the famous Swildon's Hole in the Mendips of England that is named "Cowsh Aven".
It's more-or less under a cowshed, but that's not the reason for the name!

From http://www.oucc.org.uk/dtt/vol03/dtt3_15.htm
Actually, you feel a bit of a prat going through sump 1 wearing diving gear, and even sumps 2 and 3
are free-diveable. Sump 2 is a short series of pulls on the rope, and you pop up in a large double
airbell, eerie and still. But there's nothing else to see, and you can't get out of the water, so,
frankly, you'd have to be pretty mad to want to free-dive sump 2 even if it is easy.

Sounds like my sort of fun! Totally pointless and moderately dangerous - what more recommendations
could a man ask for?

You'd also have to be quite mad to want to free-dive sump 3. This is quite deep, and very silted up
at the bottom. Horrible, but with 25 minutes of air I thought I could probably manage a technically
free-diveable sump. Then you are into Swildon's 4, a truly classic piece of stream cave, and well
worth a visit in its own right (via the entertaining blue pencil passage route which avoids all the
sumps). Towards the end of 4 you pass under cowsh aven, strategically placed under the farm on
Priddy Green, and dribbling ***. This all has to go somewhere of course, and as you flatten
yourself into sump 4 and watch the myriad creepy crawlies flowing past your face it seems as if this
is it. Again, sump 4 can be free-dived, and cannot really be bypassed. But if you plan on doing it,
its best not to know of the existence of Wells disease.


Swildons was the site of some of the first efforts in mechanised cave diving, using some home-made
contraptions that started their lives as bicycle pumps and football valves. 1936 IIRC. After a couple of
years with this approach they got hold of Standard Equipment (brass hat, lead-soled boots etc) from Siebe
Gorman and pushed on to something like sump 6, nearly killing the dozens of Sherpas on several occasions
through asphyxiation. So they moved on to pushing the resurgence for the system at Wookey Hole. Some of
the dives were broadcast live on the BBC. Then WW2 kicked off and boring things like aqualungs and
frogmans suits were invented which made proceedings much less interesting.

--
Aidan Karley, FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: 57°10'11" N, 02°08'43" W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233

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