Lamb Pot

"There's lights up at Lamb Pot again."

The man who said these words said them as he removed his anorak and took his place -in the manner of one who takes the same place every night- on the second stool from the door in the public bar at the Billet. He was a stout, solid man; bearded, and in those ageless sixties which some men achieve when age arrives but infirmity does not. He had the hands of a labourer, the flushed cheeks of a drinker, and the eyes of a schoolboy. His name was Mike.

The public bar at the Billet, once the Crooked Billet but renamed in jest after a former owner was sent down for tax fraud, was composed of a thin corridor between the bar and front wall; so narrow that a tall customer might place his glass on the bar without rising from the bench seat which ran along the wall. To the right, as you faced the bar, was the door through which Mike had just entered, and to the left the room opened out into an area just large enough to accommodate a half sized pool table. 

Sitting at the bar next to where Mike had placed himself was a young couple. They were self evidently not long married, for they both kept admiring their rings and the woman had spent much of the evening with her hand resting on her new husbands arm. They had a bookish, academic look to them; the man in a cardigan over a vintage shirt, and with thick rimmed, plastic, 'Michael Caine' glasses; and the woman in a tailored maroon velvet jacket over a yellow dress, and with her hair up in an artfully tousled French twist. Both had southern accents.

"Lamb Pot," said the young man "That would be a cave would it not? Pot being a corruption of pit." He directed this last morsel of explanation to his wife.

"You are right there," Mike said. "Lamb Pot is a cave"

"And what are the lights? Cavers?"

There was a moment of undeniable silence. Mike and the landlord, who was pouring him an unbidden Guinness, looked at each other.

"Well sir," the landlord, who's name was Sid, said. "I reckon I wouldn't tell you if you were a much younger gentleman than you are, and for sure not if you were here with other young men rather than your lady wife, for I'll catch hell from missus Braithwaite if I tell someone about Lamb Pot and they go off investigating it. But you seem a sensible enough gentleman so if you promise me you'll not go looking, I'll tell you about Lamb Pot."

"It'd take some doing just to have a look Sid," Mike said. "She's put barbed wire all the way around that field."

"There's no danger at all," the young lady added. "We've a full day planned tomorrow touring the churches, and the day after that we need to make an early start home."

As she said this there was a call for service from the corner of the bar, where two other men had been playing pool, and Sid delivered Mike his Guinness -for which the exact money had already been counted out and placed on the bar- to see what was required. Mike, after a quick sip that left foam on the bottom of his moustache, stepped into the role of storyteller like a keen understudy.

"Lamb Pot's a cave right enough," he said, "up on the hillside half a mile west of here. I've only been there a couple of times. It's wide enough at the opening, and a grown man can stand up in it and raise his arms above his head, but it narrows quick and you don't go back far before you're on your hands and knees, and not much farther than that before there's no room to turn around and you have to reverse your way out – and that was further than I cared to go."

"And what of the lights?"

"I'm coming to that. Don't get me out of order or I'll tell it wrong. You see it always had a bad reputation, Lamb Pot. My father told me he'd thrash me seven ways to Sunday if he ever heard I went up to Lamb Pot at night, and his father had said the same to him. And always the lights. No more than once or twice a year but as far back as anybody remembers there's been lights seen up there at night, and in the morning, if anyone cares to go look, they find the remains of a fire right in the entrance but nothing else. Not so much as a footprint in the mud.

"That's how it was. The lights came and went and the whole village knew to stay clear of the place, till one night when some walkers got lost on the fell. This would have been the early sixties I reckon." Mike looked at Sid who nodded as he pulled two pints of lager for the pool players. "I was just a nipper then but it makes no odds because nobody knows exactly what happened. These walkers were due for the youth hostel but they never turned up. The rain had come down hard that night, it can come down in sheets on the fell - so thick you can't see ten yards beyond your nose, and they reckon the walkers got turned around. They say the light burned extra bright that night, visible even through the weather, and they reckon those hikers saw it and headed for it.

"In the morning the youth hostel raised the alarm that they never turned up, and the man who ran it then, Jack it would have been." Again Sid nodded. "He went up to Lamb Pot to see if they'd ended up there. Well, he found their gear in the cave, rucksacks propped up and sleeping bags all laid out, and he found the remains of the fire, stone cold, but of the walkers there wasn't a sign.

"When he got back he phoned the cave rescue people and told them what he'd seen and they came down fast as they could manage. They went down into Lamb Pot, beyond that narrow place I didn't care to go, to where it drops down into a bigger pit. And that's where they found them. Or rather, they found what was left of them. All their clothes was torn up, and there was blood everywhere, and in the corner of the cave a great pile of bones with not a piece of flesh left on them."

Mike held the eyes of the young couple and dramatically sipped his Guinness.

The reader may by now have guessed that the bookish young man at the bar is also your humble narrator. Much as my wife and I enjoyed Mike's colourful tale, we thought little enough of it – except to peer into the rain as we walked back to our B&B for sight of the lights. On return to London, however, my wife determined that she would find out what, in any, truth lay behind it.

She discovered only a local newspaper story from July 1962 concerning a fatal caving accident but which was infuriatingly oblique as to the exact location. She could find no matching official record and we assumed it must have been the invention of an over-excitable journalist, perhaps even the germ of Mike's tall tale. Thus the trail went cold until, quite by chance, a little more than a year later, she chanced upon the fact that there had been an inquest in the Stockport coroner, of all places, concerning two deaths in a cave upon the fell from that same month. The records were not at Kew, and it was another six months until a colleague of hers, who was in the area, was able to have sight of them and send her a copy.

To my wife, then, the thrill of the chase, but to myself the glory of the prize - for she says she has no interest in writing it up (she makes, too, some complements of my prose style which I shall not repeat – she is a biased judge).

The file is a peculiar one. It seems all witnesses provided written statements and none were allowed to be questioned in court, and the instructions to the jury were strikingly prohibitive. Both my wife and I came away with the impression that efforts were made to avoid public scrutiny. Four of the hiking party, including one of the deceased, were minors, and the coroner was draconian in instructions that none could be identified in the press. The movement of the hearing to Stockport has no explanation but we suspect this, too, was to throw off local interest.

The verdict was death by misadventure, finding that the two who died ventured into the cave and fell, but there is more to what happened than that. I can do no better than to quote directly from the witness statements. The first of these is from Sam Jones, the guide at a local outward bound centre who led the hike.

It was my third summer at the centre and Colonel Fairfax trusted me to run my own activities. This year I had been offering the keener boys what we called a Long Hike. On the first day we would walk to the Lune and spend the night in the open, and if possible catch our supper in the river, on the second day we would go over the fell to the youth hostel, and on the third day return to camp. I offered this on the Tuesday with plans to set off on Wednesday morning and four boys volunteered; Roger Hume, Guy Mackrory, Duncan Saxby, and St John Smith-Allen.

I had no worries about the ability of the first three but Smith-Allen was a very small boy. He was tenacious to a fault but I was concerned he might not have the strength. He was very popular with the others though, and they made representations on his behalf at lunchtime, asking that he might be allowed to come. I allowed it in part because I was going to bring along a friend of mine, Gethin Green, and so we would be two adults to four boys.

The first day went well. We made the Lune in good time and caught more trout than we could eat. Gethin was a great expert at catching trout. We cooked them on an open fire and slept under the stars. The boys enjoyed it a great deal.

The second day the weather turned against us and the hike over the fell was hard and slow going. Shortly after sunset the full force of the storm hit and the visibility became very bad. If we continued south-east we would hit the road sooner or later and be able to follow that in to the village but I could not be sure how far it was and I was concerned we might stumble into a sink hole for there are many in the area. That was when we saw the camp fire in the distance.

I shall swap, at this point, to Roger Hume, one of the boys.

We were very glad to find the fire in the cave but we were surprised to find nobody there. Sam said the people who lit it probably decided to leave when the weather turned and we might actually be only a hundred yards from the road but could not know that for sure. Gethin made some scran with instant mash and the leftover trout and we ate that and biscuits. We soon warmed up and at that point it was rather jolly. There wasn't any spare wood though so when the fire started to die down we climbed into our sleeping bags. We were all plenty tired anyway.

I woke up in the night. I don't know when but the fire had burned out and it was completely dark. I was sure some sound had woken me but I did not know what. I lay there listening for a moment and even though I could not see anything, or hear anything apart from the rain, I was certain something was moving about in the cave.

We were packed in pretty tight and I reached over to nudge Duncan awake and found he was not there. His sleeping bag was empty. I called for him quietly, just hissing his name because I did not want to wake the others, but there was no answer. When I did that I got the sense that whatever was in the cave turned its attention toward me and I really got the shivers then. I still couldn't hear or see anything and I supposed I was just imagining things but the impression was very strong. I had a torch in my pack and I wished then that I had thought to put it in hands reach. St John was sleeping on my other side and I nudged him awake. He asked what was up and I told him Duncan wasn't there and we both tried to call without being too loud.

Sam woke up, on the other side of the cave. He asked what was wrong and I told him that Duncan had gone. He said it was probably a toilet break but I pointed out it was still raining hard. Sam turned his torch on at that point, which woke the other two up but pleased me no end because I could finally see that there was nothing else in the cave. Sam said he would go out and look for Duncan and put his boots and coat on and left the cave.

After he had gone St John said he heard something from the back of the cave, from the passageway. I had my torch out of my pack by then and shined it down there but we could not see anything. I did hear something though. It sounded like a muffled cry to me. Like a man might make if another man had a hand over his mouth. Since I had the only torch other the Gethin's I volunteered to go down the passage and investigate. Gethin said okay but St John should go with me so he followed behind.

The passage narrowed quickly and I was forced to go on my belly. Again I was sure there was something else in there with me, just ahead but always beyond the torch light. I went another few feet but the passage got very narrow and I said so. St John said he should go instead because he was smaller and I didn't mind that at all. I started pushing myself backwards and told him to pull me out by my ankles.

Somehow, when I was pushing with the torch in my hand, I must have turned it off. The moment it went dark something seized my wrists. Like strong hands. I never saw them but they held me so tight I had bruises afterwards. I would have been pulled forward for sure had St John not had hold of my ankles. Whatever it was pulled devilishly hard and I was certain it was going to pull me down and St John too if he did not let go, but I still had the torch in my hand and I managed to turn it on with my thumb and the moment there was light there was nothing holding my wrists anymore and St John, who was pulling for all his worth, jerked me back and I think he got my boot in the face for his efforts.

You can be sure we got out of the passage double-time and told the others what had happened. Gethin thought I had just caught my hands in some tree roots and panicked and said he would take his torch and look. Well Guy held my torch and St John and I squeezed in behind Gethin ready to pull him back if we had to, and he went down on his belly and crawled into that hole. He said there were no tree roots, which I had told him was the case, and then he made a surprised noise and there was a crash and his torch went dark. He shouted for us to pull him back but he had not laced his boots up and they came off in our hands and we watched his feet disappear into the hole.

The rest of the accounts are somewhat confused. It appears Guy panicked and ran from the cave with the torch while Roger had to physically restrain St John from wriggling down the passage after Gethin before they, too, fled the now pitch dark cave. Sam Jones saw them go as he was returning. Finding the cave now empty he followed them. As luck would have it they arrived on the road within sight of the sign for the village and were quickly able the head in and raise the alarm. The police were called, and so were the volunteer cave rescue service. One of the cavers describes what he found.

Lamb Pot was known to us but is on private land and had never been properly explored. It was understood to be a small cave and not reckoned to be much of interest. We made the descent at two o-clock in the afternoon. There is a belly crawl followed by a pit twelve feet deep into a room only six foot by eight. This was empty but there was a boulder choke in one corner. We cleared the boulders and this gave us a window into a second room about ten feet by twenty, only five feet high at the highest. In this room we found a number of clothes and other items as well as the bones. On discovering this we realised we were most likely at a crime scene and left without disturbing anything.

There are two pathology reports attached. The later of the two is the only one referred to by the coroner. It is the most equivocal and obfuscatory document of its type I have ever read. It does identify the two missing hikers among the remains but says only that they "show signs of being partially destroyed by wild animals." Of the other remains it says just that "the majority appear to be of sheep."

The first report is more precise. It says this:

The bones had been arranged and stacked by type against the wall of the cave with the skulls placed atop the piles. Seven of the remains were human, the remainder were sheep and small mammals. Two have been identified as Gethin Green and Duncan Saxby. The remaining five are between two and six hundred years old and it is unlikely identification will be possible. There were only trace amounts of flesh on the Green and Saxby remains. All the remains examined show signs of gnawing by human teeth.

The coroner comes to the verdict I have already mentioned and remarks only that Mr Braithwaite, the owner of the land, has since had the cave concreted up at the narrowest point.

The lights my wife and I saw suggest this may not have had much effect.