Once upon a time there was a caving club in the West Midlands called WMCEG…

Well actually WMCEG (the West Midlands Cave Exploration Group) is still there, but we aren’t, we’ve moved to Cumbria and (to be honest) almost entirely given up caving in favour of climbing. Whilst climbing was always my “first” sport, there was a time when we were doing a awful lot of hard UK caving and potholing.

A rare picture of Colin smiling!

And so it was that last night we got invited over to Greenclose to say “Hi” to some of our old pals (a few of whom blog here – Colin, Dave, David) and to see a slideshow by Clive Westlake. Clive happens to be an amazing cave photographer…

Clive getting ready to present his slideshow

We were super pleased to be rewarded with some awesome photographs including some shots of the far reaches of Ogof Draenen in South Wales that Laetitia and I had helped with. Here are a couple of Clive’s amazing pictures:

The Geryon

The Geryon's Lair

Luck of the Draw; Laetitia on Valentines Day in 1998!

Needles; with Laetitia's finger for scale

Yes, shocking but true, Laetitia and I were there on Valentines Day 1998! Even more shocking, it was our first Valentine’s Day together. I guess a whole lot more people have been to these formations since 1998, but when we were there more people had been to the moon; it’s a very hard place to get to… …but it must be a good place for love , check this other post out An engagement beyond the Last Sandwich.

The final few pictures of Clive’s show were of beautiful column formations and perfect phreatic tubes in France – they were enough to make me fancy a trip there to see them for myself! Maybe some caving is back on the adventuring menu?

Over to you to get it organised Dave?