A page to help you with what we are, what we want and why this website is lacking.

Is caving for me?

Undertaking a proper caving trip is the best way to find out. It is a different experience to the tourist (show) caves with concrete floors and big electric lighting! We occasionally organise easier trips or we can arrange them specially to give novices and potential new members a chance to see what it’s all about! The New to Caving website or Start Caving website carries more information on the subject. If you’re after a quick sample of caving, or a one-off session you might be best arranging the services of a proper instructor.

Why go caving?

It could be a different answer from caver to caver – being able to get away from it all, seeing the formations, the sporting aspect or perhaps digging / exploring and going to places where nobody has ever been or even seen before (unclimbed mountains have usually been seen from planes and satellites!) Have a look in the gallery section of this website and see for yourself..

Where is the club meets list?

We no longer have one. Because the club is small, quite online savvy and we prefer organising things at short notice it was deemed best to remove any list as we often found it changing!
This method allows flexibility in meets; the biggest factor we have no control over is the weather. The recent improvements in access to Dales caves has made this system easier to run. It requires no meets-officer as any member can suggest a trip and date whenever they so choose.

What’s the difference between Black Rose – Pothole and Caving – Clubs?

The Pothole club was active from the late 50s until it disbanded in 1960, later reformed 76-77 before disappearing once more. The caving club was born in 2001 and its members have become good friends with the older members of the pothole club. The members of the pothole club used to organise reunion dinners every year – Geds YouTube Channel has videos of some of those reunions, along with Thursday walking club videos (plus lots of metal detecting videos). There’s a brief history of both flavours of club on this website.
The caving club is considered as the “new Black Rose”, only minor words differentiate between old and new. Despite the Caving Club classing itself as started in 2001, we are linked with the Pothole Club and collectively are “The” Black Rose!

Why does the club not like bureaucracy? Why no committee? Is this club different to others?

We are a caving club – nothing more nothing less. We would much rather be out caving than sat around having meetings and doing excessive paperwork.
If you think you need committees for a club to survive and to go caving we recommend you consider joining another club. Any problems arising (which is very rare) or anything which requires discussion will be dealt with by consulting everyone within the club (via our forum) not just a select few.
At the end of the day we all have a common goal regardless of how the clubs are run – to go caving, potholing, digging, photographing, etc..

The website; using, accessing, problems?

The site has been designed to work on a variety of different browsers (although we do recommend using the more recent versions to gain the best experience).
With the latest incarnation of the site it should automatically adjust to suit the screen size, so should work equally well on computer-tablet-phone. Certain sections of the website are for members only and trying to access content without the relevant credentials will return an error.
If you find an issue with the site; incorrect loading, strange errors, broken links etc then please get in touch via the contact page.

Why has the website changed?

We decided a change was needed, this with the need to provide a site that is simpler to update (the old site was largely manually coded and updated which was a time consuming job!) and a way of integrating everything to one style.