Cavers - Stuart, Andy, Alisdair & Kate
The first Morley trip of 2026 saw us head to an extremely frosty Derbyshire to take a trip into P8, located a few miles further along the road from Giants.As we walked up to the entrance on a beautiful sunny -4 day with views down the valley to Mam Tor, there was much discussion about how much of a wetting we'd be getting (P8 is accessed through what can only be described as a small waterfall) but happily the flow was fairly sedate and it felt a good 10 degrees warmer going underground, despite the splattering of frigid water across the head, back and legs as you get through the entrance as quickly as possible.P8 is a really interesting cave with a lovely meandering streamway and a tonne of exploring to do once you get to the bottom of the cave, but first there are a couple of pitches, not counting the 2m climb down Idiots Leap; this has an in-situ knotted rope but we did rig, mainly to allow us to get out of the water.The first pitch gave the opportunity to practice a hanging rebelay which I seem to have got somewhat of a mental block about; however superbly supervised by the other three, the manoeuvre was completed without incident and we moved on to the second pitch, which involves a fun swing across a pit when nearly at the bottom of the pitch to land on a convenient large shelf.Here we left our SRT kit and went for an explore. There are a warren of passages, offering flat out crawling (the tightest squeeze Alasdair had ever encountered apparently!), some very physical hand over fist hauling up ropes to view some higher level passages, a number of sumps, some fun traversing, gorgeous streamway and some slithery sections. We also headed up to take a look at Ben's dig which is a very impressive sight, with what appears to number thousands of sand bags stacked in the preceding passages and a new route gradually emerging from the silt, down a crazily stacked series of ladders.After running into another party of cavers and viewing a splendid natural formation of clay in Mud Hall (IYKYK), we headed back to re-don our SRT kit and head out, practicing the hanging rebelay in reverse (definitely harder with 4 ropes on the pitch!) and taking a quick look at the alternative high level route above the first pitch. As we neared the exit it got steadily colder and climbing back out through the stream and up the icicled entrance was quite the experience. Andy and I headed back first, leaving Alasdair and Stuart to derig, with our hair and clothes quite literally freezing as we walked back across the fields to the car.We warmed up with tea, home made cake and 17 layers but I still needed to defrost my bare feet on the dashboard heaters driving home. A really enjoyable day out.
Trip report by Kate.
