It had been a few years since I'd been to the Lofthouse area and I'd been looking forward to the trip for a while. As we arrived at the cave, it appeared that there were 19 of us all planning to do Goyden, so we split into 3 parties to make life easier. Somehow in all the confusion though, two of the groups became one, so off I set with Ray, Richard, Chris & Nick to attack Goyden as the others went down Manchester Hole.

Just like last time, I had a copy of the survey. Just like last time, I'd left it at home! Ah, well; it had only been 5 years, so I was sure I'd remember the way. About 100 yards inside the cave, I warned the others to keep to the right, as there was a passage somewhere in the left hand wall that we didn't want to go down. Unfortunately, by this time, we'd already passed the passage and were soon at the window, with a 20' drop to the river.

Once we were in the river, I said, route finding would be easy as we only had to follow the water downstream to the sump and then follow the passage on the left to Five Ways. After about 15 minutes at the sump, we found the passage and were soon at Five Way Junction, but could only see four of the passages!

"Eeny, meeny, miny, mo... that one!"

We headed up the chosen route and eventually arrived back at Five Ways. Now it was Ray's turn to guess and it wasn't long before we realised that this wasn't the way, either. Richard's voice came echoing down the passage shouting something about a 10' ladder. At the top, Chris & Richard went to the left and Ray went to the right.

"This way", called Ray, so everyone turned round and followed. We had to wait a while for Chris, however, as he was someway along the other passage by now. After a while, we came across the 20' pitch into Carbide Tin Passage - totally the opposite direction to where we wanted to be. Deciding to give up and go out, we set off back for the ladder and met up with Alan Bolton's group coming in. He promptly pulled out a survey and said that we should have gone left at the top of the ladder, not right. Chris was pleased!

Soon we were in Cap Left Crawl and memories of a trip five years ago came flooding back. Flood debris was everywhere. Along the body-sized tube, over the tree, past the shrubbery and through the tight bit to the railway sleeper we crawled - hoping the waterways board didn't decide to open the dam upstream. Then it was up through the forest into walking passage again. I remembered that the last time I was in this passage, the Mad Vet found a pair of albino craneflies having sex - and promptly pulled one of their legs off!

Soon we were out into the sun, again, thinking that we might have had better luck at route-finding if we had taken Fiona & Nev's Lucky Mascot with us - but then again, maybe not!

Having got changed & fed, we set off down the lane towards the pub, meeting Nev et al coming out of Goyden. Nev couldn't understand it, saying he was sure that they had been going the right way through the cave, but had found themselves in a passage so full of debris that it couldn't have been the right way - so they turned back only a couple of hundred yards from the entrance!

Kev Sheard

(Those confused: Richard Oxley, Ray Taylor, Chris Tate & Nick Tate)