The height of Darkness

Well I spent this weekend down in the county of Devon in a place just outside Totness where my grandmother lives. On the Saturday we met up with my Uncle Keith and Aunt Helen to do a little geocaching. We went to a National Trust park not far from dartmoor and walked along the river for about 20min or so before coming to the bridge. After about 20min of searching, Keith finally spotted the geocache underneath the bridge. The only problem was it was right in the middle of the bridge and only accessible from the water. So I took off my shoes and socks and waded out to the middle of the river (about knee deep) and jumped up and grab onto some reinforcing under the bridge and stayed there swinging on one arm while I grabbed the canister. That was the easy part. Getting it back up was a bit of a problem while swinging from one arm but I eventually got it back into place. I got a little bit wet from the river but it didn't really matter as this is England and of course it was raining anyways.

Later that afternoon when my cousin Sam was off work he joined Keith and me on another geocache. This one was unlike any others that we had done as it involved us climbing into a cave and had the name "the height of darkness". We had some trouble finding the entrance and it resulted in a few hundred stinging nettle stings as I was only wearing shorts. Once we scaled a bit of a rock face we came across a very small opening. After looking at it quite skeptically, Keith dove in head first and we followed not allowing ourselves to be outdone. Once inside this cave we could all stand up without a problem. There were a lot of spiders with egg pouches on the walls but it was really amazing inside. The clue for the geocache said to look in the highest chamber. There was another chamber a little higher in the cave so we made our way up to that before we found this rope leading up a steep incline. There was just enough room to lie on our stomachs and inch our way up while holding onto this rope. We figured we must have ascended about 100ft before we got to yet another really small opening. Only just scraping though the opening we found ourselves in this really large chamber that was about 20ft high. While same climbed up a ledge and found the geocache I was taking a few photos with an old camera. Through a small hole in the roof of the cave was a few bats and a few more spiders. After this we made our way back down without going into some of the other areas of caves as the girls were back at home with the BBQ. But I am sure one if not all of us will be back there again at some point. Who knows maybe this time we won't go in shorts and t-shirts and we might even take hardhats with us.