Halliggye Fogou Fogou View all content for Halliggye Fogou

We entered the Trelowarren estate from the south off the B3293, driving mostly through woodland, after that it all gets a little hazy. I had intended to attempt a drive all the way to Halliggye farm house, but it never materialised, I did see a promising footpathish type thing going off left into a field, but with no sign saying Fogou I carried on. All the way to the big car parks, there's two, I chose the right hand one, and ended up parking with in yards of the footpathish type thing. With not much at all to go on, Eric and I went that way, we did have a 1:50,000 map but it's not finely detailed. The path was just a mowed grassy stretch at the edge of the field leading to a small wooded area, I hoped it would be there, it wasn't. But there was something, a tall mound with a winding path round it. This I decided was the Mount marked on the map, hence we should go west. At this time we noticed a number on a sign post, this must be part of a kind of guided walk, we followed it, to a couple of houses. One of which was called Halliggye. The fogou is behind it. Elation! From now on, when we're trying to find a stony site and we're not sure we're going in the right direction, but walking it anyway, we could be walking away from it for all we know, it will be called Fogou anxiety. Fogou anxiety has now been replaced by Fogou adoration. There is a box with a windup torch, thank you, and together with the two little torches we've brought and the flash on my Camera and Eric's phone I felt we'd be sufficiently enlightened, and not in the dark. So it's straight in, down the Victorian gated entrance and into the gloom, it's taller than I thought, we can more or less stand up straight, right up until the point that we can't, standing before two low entrance ways to different pats of the Fogou. We firstly take the right hand entrance, down on our knees we shuffle through the low trilithon portal, it doesn't go very far though, this is the original entrance, now bricked up and blocked off. There was a very big cave spider in here on the modern wall, Eric doesn't like spiders, he fair pushed me out of the way to get out. Time now for the left hand entrance, it's slightly less cramped getting through this one and once through we can just about stand up again, torches powering through the darkness reveal a long well built curving corridor, we follow it onwards. At it's end is a raised stumbling block, "thanks for that Kelty", and just beyond the stumble and in a small area at the end of the passage is the smallest lowest passage entrance I've ever crawled through. But crawl through we did, we got to the end and sat on our haunches, then we turned off the lights. Trying to look through darkness is a funny thing, your brain kind of says well if your not going to look at things I'm going to make stuff up, then you start to see things, who needs LSD when you've got Fogous, imagine them both together, cringes, absolute madness. Lights back on we make our way out, crawling, stumbling, watching for spiders and yet all the time looking round in awe and wonder. We're back outside now, Eric's wicked sense of humour kicked in a bit and he likened our experience to that of Thailand's recent caving story, not funny, but I knew what he meant, that was like nothing I've ever seen before. Are all Fogous like this? no, but I wish they were. Boleigh! buck your friggin ideas up.

Posted by postman 29th July 2018ce

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