First digging session of the year, 2012 will be 30 years of exploration in Hallowe’en Rift, hopefully we have something good to celebrate. We were surprised to note that the field from the farm on the walk up to Hallowe’en Rift had numerous daisies, buttercups and dandelions in flower, evidence of the extremely mild winter so far. In between a lot of chatting we set about clearing the last bit of spoil dumped at the base of Witches Cauldron which didn’t take too long. I went to the end of the tubes to continue to dig into the rift, Alex in the meantime settled down to clear more out from the lower part of Witches Cauldron. The rift is beginning to look very interesting and we have pulled out some quite large lumps of flowstone (about 250mm x 250mm in area and 50-60mm in thickness) there is not much evidence for this material to have been transported any great distance. Possibly this flowstone originates from a capping layer on the surface of the sediments. After 2.5 hours of digging and soaking up water and a rather cold draught today began to get cold and we had just about run out of stacking space so called it a day and returned to the surface. Excellent session and can’t wait to get back down to continue the work. Popped into the Hunter’s for quick refreshments.
