Death's Head Hole
| Death's Head Hole | |
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Entrance of Death's Head Hole
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| Location | Leck Fell, Lancashire, England |
| OS grid | SD 66797916 |
| Coordinates | 54°12′25″N 2°30′38″W / 54.207062°N 2.510612°WCoordinates: 54°12′25″N 2°30′38″W / 54.207062°N 2.510612°W |
| Depth | 82 metres (269 ft) |
| Length | about 700 metres (2,300 ft) |
| Elevation | 341 metres (1,119 ft) |
| Discovery | 1889 |
| Geology | Carboniferous limestone |
| Entrances | 3 |
| Hazards | verticality |
| Access | CNCC Permit |
| Cave survey | cavemaps |
Death's Head Hole is a cave on Leck Fell, in Lancashire, England. Its entrance is a 64-metre (210 ft) deep shaft. It leads into Lost Johns' Cave, and is part of the Three Counties System, an 87 kilometres (54 mi) cave system which spans the borders of Cumbria, Lancashire, and North Yorkshire.
The fenced entrance shaft descends some 64 metres (210 ft) onto a loose boulder slope which leads to a second pitch of 6 metres (20 ft) into the Main Chamber, a large chamber with a waterfall entering at the east end. An excavated 10-metre (33 ft) deep scaffolded shaft in the bottom corner of the chamber soon leads into a stream passage some 100 metres (330 ft) long which ends at a 4-metre (13 ft) waterfall into the main Lost Johns' Master Cave about 200 metres (660 ft) from its terminal sump.
A 23-metre (75 ft) climb up the waterfall in the Main Chamber enters East Passage, a well decorated phreatic passage with a misfit stream. It passes under an aven, and eventually lowers to a silted crawl after 150 metres (490 ft). The aven has been climbed for 43 metres (141 ft) to a choked inlet. The stream enters East Passage from a low crawl after 50 metres (160 ft), called Dolphin Passage. This gets larger, and passes a small passage heading towards Eyeholes, a choked pothole located some 50 metres north-east of the entrance to Death's Head Hole, before reaching a very wet section. This has been forced through to the bottom of Long Drop Cave, which is the source of the water.
Big Meanie (also called Hawthorn Pot and Nostril Pot) is another entrance into the system situated about 100 metres (330 ft) due west of Death's Head Hole, in a shakehole by a kink in the wall. A tight rift leads directly onto a 49-metre (161 ft) pitch which lands in a tall fissure passage. To the west, the passage terminates in a large chamber and a mud choke. To the east the passage divides, with one branch heading towards Eyeholes before becoming too tight, and the other passing through a dug-out constriction into a muddy crawl that finishes on a ledge 21 metres (69 ft) above the floor of the Death's Head Main Chamber, opposite East Passage.
The cave is a solutional cave formed in Visean Great Scar limestone from the Mississippian Series of the Carboniferous period. Its development has been largely determined by the same vertical fault encountered in Rumbling Hole and Big Meanie. The stream which flows through the cave originates from Long Drop Cave, and flows through to Lost Johns' Cave as a tributary, to eventually emerge from the Leck Beck Head spring in Ease Gill. It is thought that what is now the main cave is relatively recent, and that some 350,000 years ago water sinking at Rumbling Hole followed a phreatic trunk route along the fault, entering Death's Head Hole at the end of East Passage, flowed across what is now the Main Chamber, into the passages below Big Meanie. From here the water flowed through a continuation of the now-blocked passage to Glasfurds Chamber in Gavel Pot, and hence to a resurgence in the Leck Beck Valley some 100 metres (330 ft) above the current resurgence, which is now covered with glacial till.
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