One of those typical Mendip winter days – grey, damp and the forecast is for it to be very damp. Following a conversation I’d had with the farmer on christmas eve and a previous visit with the kids, before the digging session we ventured up to have a look at an interesting exposure of Triassic rocks – mostly of Dolomitic Conglomerate.
There are a number of interesting features that are worth looking at and a couple are depicted in the photographs above and below that might be evidence of some initial cave formation processes within Dolomitic Conglomerate. We will return to this area to carry out a field survey and comparison of strike/dip angles with those at Hallowe’en Rift area.
After our detour we decided to return to the prime objective – digging in Hallowe’en Rift, especially as the weather was closing in. Cleared out Witches Cauldron of last sessions digging spoil and that was enough, very claggy. I returned to the surface to emerge in some very low cloud, waited for quite some time for Alex to return. Alex had a bit of an ‘epic’ – at the bottom of Witches Cauldron where it is rather restricted for space Alex’s foot had slipped into a narrow rift filled with ‘gloop’ and while we had been working away, his foot became stuck fast and had required a considerable effort and some contortion to extract it. He arrived at the surface rather relieved not to have sacrificed his wellington boot!