SECRET CAVE IN GORT

PollnaGonzo story

BACKGROUND

Colin Bunce from Clare Caving Club was shown a cave about 20 years ago by some huntsmen shooting for woodcock, one of the birds went down and Gonzo the dog went to retrieve it, he took longer than normal so they went to look for him and found him in the now aptly named Poll na Gonzo. It is as yet unclear which of the last three dogs; all named Gonzo, found the cave.
Sometime in late July Colin remembered about the cave and went to look for it and after three hours in the blackthorn scrub re-found it. Since then there have been several Clare Caving Club trips to reveal two separate digs.

MEGALODON eCCR & SATORI pSCR INTRO NIGHT

Sump 1 in Fergus River Cave

FERGUS RIVER CAVE PART 2

In sump 1 fot. Quentin Cooper

TOWARDS SUMP 3

Martyn’s survey showed the way on somewhere to the right, at the end of the sump pool but after an awkward climb over a pile of boulders all I found there was a flooded bedding plane ( wide and low horizontal passage) with 5cm of airspace. Equipped with a single cylinder I slid under the low roof only to surface a couple of meters further on into a big open passage. So far, so good. Another climb over a mud bank brought me to the higher level and from there a stooping passage led to the four way junction. There things didn’t look that good anymore. First off all Martyn’s survey showed a three way junction with the middle one leading to the sump 3 but here there were two middle passages, one above the other. The other thing was that they were both too small to be entered. The lower one ( 1x0.4m) has an impassable constriction created by a partially fallen roof  after only 3 meters but it seemed like I could sorted it out if I had some tools. The passage on the higher level looked WAY less promising being simply a 20-25cm bedding plane with no visible prospects of opening up.
I started digging at the constriction in the lower middle passage using a steel carabineer. After 40 min the obstacle was passed but ahead the passage started closing down. Fuck. The upper bedding plane was now the only option left. The floor of this low wide passage was a thin layer of compacted mud overlying solid rock, occasionally strewn with sharp rocks solidly embedded in the mud. If I could remove some of them there was a chance I could engineer some convoluted route on for some distance.This all looked like a desperate venture but it was either this or I could go home now. The latter wasn't an option. I started digging.

FERGUS RIVER CAVE PART 1

One of the wedge tombs on the hills above Fergus River Cave

Poll-na-Cloch-Greanta -  Cave of the Engraved Stone is the highest resurgence of Fergus River - sacred river of Neolithic people. The hills above the resurgence bare the highest concentration of megalithic tombs in the whole of the Burren suggesting perhaps the presence of some sort of Neolithic/Bronze Age cemetery. With the wedge tombs being most certainly regarded as the spiritual portals to the Otherworld the cave entrance itself must have been of powerful, magical and ritual significance to those people.
The cave is over 3 km long but since it collects 60% of water from the whole Burren Plateau there’s a common agreement among speleologists and hydrogeologists that the known cave passages are just a small part of the whole system, perhaps no more than 10% … 30km cave ? Who could resist…