It all started with a bit of a confused organization (on my part) for this unscheduled trip which ended up being a great day. The weather was....damp to say the least, and the previous nights rainfall had been particularly bad according to the assistant in Inglesport. Toyland was the original target, but over breakfast we did discuss going in Notts2 (which was scheduled for the following day) but decided to stick with Toyland and actually cancelled Notts2 due to the amount of water around. We headed up to Kingsdale, got changed and went to the entrance (I do like a short walk in!)
Robin and I commented on how much water there was, agreeing that neither of us had seen it this high before
We walked past the Milkyway left-turn to go and look at the master cave
The master cave was in a fair amount of flow, but walk-able (with care). We all went down the in-situ rope and had a brief wander but didn't go too far before turning back; Toyland was our goal, not the master cave
Getting back to the Milkyway turn, we crawled along until we got to the cascades and then had half an hour exploring the Derbyshire extensions, but with only the CNCC description and no survey we were unsure how far it went or if there was anything worth going for (although Alasdair went for a solo crawl for 5 minutes to be doubly sure), we turned back to the cascades.
We all got up the pitch & along the squeezy traverse and got into the Toyland chamber, and had a good look at the formations & stalactites.
We headed out of Toyland, up-stream through some sporting waterfall climbs and arrived at the chamber where the Good Friday passage & Victoria Extension go off. The CNCC description didn't provide any enticement to explore either, simply referring to the Northern Caves book (which no-one had). As we'd been underground for 3 hours already and the consensus was to leave it here for today and head back out. But we needed to have a group picture first
We headed back out without much incident. There was a comment or 2 about the crawl through the water being much colder than it had been earlier - perhaps we were all a bit wetter now :)
Once out, and before we got changed, Robin wanted to go and look at the Keld head resurgence, which was "only a minute down the road" (*cough* 5-10 mins)
Once changed, Andy headed home and Robin, Alasdair, Kate & myself went back to Ingleton, first to Inglesport (neoprene gloves for Kate, Northern Caves book for me!) and then for a drink at the Wheatsheaf in Ingleton