Death's Head Hole

Balderstone described the entrance shaft to Death's Head Hole in detail in 1881 in Ingleton - Bygone and Present, and plumbed it at 200 ft: <blockquote>Here is another chasm like the Fairies' Workshop, not so richly adorned, but still radiant in its embellishments, yet possessing a most remarkable configuration, indeed, that of the head and jaws of a human skeleton. The main shaft of the hole represents the mouth; a bridgelike bar of rock passes across the eastern verge, but is hollow below, so as to connect the chasm with a more shallow cavity beyond. The most peculiar feature, however, consists in a second bar-like bridge of limestone somewhat more slender than the first, spanning the…

The fenced entrance shaft descends some 64 m onto a loose boulder slope which leads to a second pitch of 6 m into the Main Chamber, a large chamber with a waterfall entering at the east end. An excavated 10 m deep scaffolded shaft in the bottom corner of the chamber soon leads into a stream passage some 100 m long which ends at a 4 m waterfall into the main Lost Johns' Master Cave about 200 m from its terminal sump. A 23 m climb up the waterfall in the Main Chamber enters East Passage, a well decorated phreatic passage with a misfit stream. It passes under an aven, and eventually lowers to a silted crawl after 150 m. The aven has been climbed for 43 m to a choked inlet. The stream enters…