With the quarry only being a stones throw away from work, I’ve decided recently to check out the place after reading Kieran McCarthy’s piece about it , what particularly caught my attention from the post was the mention of caves in it. I was surprised at how easily accessible some of them were.
We found at least 5 different entrances with varying degrees of accessibility, one of the easiest is the one at the easterly cave where there is plenty of room in the inside chamber for three to stand, other entrances didn’t open as much and the westerly entrance required climbing down at least 3 meters to get comfortably inside it. It was inside this cave where we did the brunt of the somewhat limited exploring.
It wasn’t the climb that was the difficult part of entering the cave though, our biggest obstacle was the pile of rubbish consisting of beer cans, plastic bags, bottles and especially broken glass.
There were several other items that we found in various parts close to the entrance, including a tennis ball, a volleyball, rusted pliers and a large egg which my spelunking companion later cracked to a horrifying discovery.
There were a couple of tight spots.
There were plenty of small chambers to crawl through but according to Brian Murphy’s map survey published featured in the Irish Speleological journal, we’ve only managed to cover only a quarter of what was explored in 1973. We had barely reached the Cone Chamber.
Brian Murphy’s survey of Beaumont Cave – 1973 , Photo provided by Conor Harding
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