Went back for a longer look at this treacherous labrynth of quarry tunnels which was dug mostly to provide agricultural lime (a lot of acidic soils in Scotland). There were once many entrances to these workings but now only two are known to have survived, bizarrely some were blocked up very close to the easterly entrance and its not clear why that wasn't sealed as well. I looked at the eastern entrance first but didn't like the look of it, some large cracks visible in the rock.
Entering from the western entrance I kept at first to a route marked with blue string, the string was reassuring at first as it seems to offer an easy way back out, but I eventually moved away from it to see other sections, thinking that it couldn't be that hard to find the blue string again. After I'd been in about 3 hours i decided to start moving back to the exit, only to find that it was quite impossible to locate the blue string again, though I came across other coloured strings. Forced to admit that I was lost I decided to track north and east by way of a compass I'd been wise to bring, hoping to strike the other entrance. A problem with Cults now is that there are quite a few signs to 'exits' that are now blocked up, I did actually come to a blocked entrance, which was full of soil pushed in by an excavator (I think this must have been the one next to the 'dangerous mines' entrance), at another point daylight could be seen but it was an entrance I'd seen earlier which was blocked by having several large boulders dumped in it. Moving on, I came at last to the surviving eastern entrance which I'd looked at earlier. I had no idea at the time that I'd be leaving by that entrance, the plan was to leave the way I went in, from the west. Fortunately Cults is on elongated east/west layout with all the entrances now on the north side, but without the compass I could have stayed lost for a long time, you have absolutely no sense of direction in a place like that and a compass can be a real game changer if you get lost, provided you know roughly the relative locations of the exits. Cults has had rescue call outs before for ill prepared explorers, including once three teenagers who went in with one torch between them which broke when one fell over, they were stuck in darkness for about seventeen hours before being found.
Entering from the western entrance I kept at first to a route marked with blue string, the string was reassuring at first as it seems to offer an easy way back out, but I eventually moved away from it to see other sections, thinking that it couldn't be that hard to find the blue string again. After I'd been in about 3 hours i decided to start moving back to the exit, only to find that it was quite impossible to locate the blue string again, though I came across other coloured strings. Forced to admit that I was lost I decided to track north and east by way of a compass I'd been wise to bring, hoping to strike the other entrance. A problem with Cults now is that there are quite a few signs to 'exits' that are now blocked up, I did actually come to a blocked entrance, which was full of soil pushed in by an excavator (I think this must have been the one next to the 'dangerous mines' entrance), at another point daylight could be seen but it was an entrance I'd seen earlier which was blocked by having several large boulders dumped in it. Moving on, I came at last to the surviving eastern entrance which I'd looked at earlier. I had no idea at the time that I'd be leaving by that entrance, the plan was to leave the way I went in, from the west. Fortunately Cults is on elongated east/west layout with all the entrances now on the north side, but without the compass I could have stayed lost for a long time, you have absolutely no sense of direction in a place like that and a compass can be a real game changer if you get lost, provided you know roughly the relative locations of the exits. Cults has had rescue call outs before for ill prepared explorers, including once three teenagers who went in with one torch between them which broke when one fell over, they were stuck in darkness for about seventeen hours before being found.
