An 80-metre abseil. Hours of crawling through Derbyshire’s longest coffin level. A lid that might not open from the inside. Mark’s biggest concern? The cows.

Deep Shaft to Ringing Rake Sough started as a team of six. Andy pulled out for a weekend away. Julia had a clash. Jae’s knee made the decision for her.

“This trip is doomed,” I wrote in the group chat, with all the authority of someone who wasn’t going underground himself.

Sam, Mark and Kev went anyway. Mark also packed a folding shovel, on the off-chance they could dig into a side passage.

“There’s like a 10% chance we get there,” Sam had estimated. The shovel stayed in the bag.

The pitch drops 80 metres without a rebelay, and the rope stretch makes the whole thing bouncy. “You would be going down then it was slip half a meter then repeat,” Sam said. “Almost impossible to be smooth.” Different levels of the mine open up on the way down, which helps take your mind off the bouncing.

Then the coffin level. When they call it Derbyshire’s longest, they’re not exaggerating. Hands and knees, sometimes flat out, with a few inches of water for company.

“Haven’t spent that much time crawling since I was a baby,” was Mark’s verdict. The water helped, though, keeping things cooler through what could otherwise have been unbearable.

Centuries of pick marks cover the passage walls. Miners carved every inch by hand, long before anyone thought of doing this for fun. The scale of it lands harder when you’re on your hands and knees, face to face with someone else’s working life.

Under UV light, the rock lit up. Reds, purples, pinks, oranges, greens, blues. Honey calcite (or “yellow calcite,” Kev noted, which sounds less impressive). Sam shot over sixty photos trying to capture it all.

The exit is the gamble. You can’t check the lid at Ringing Rake Sough from outside. You commit to the whole system and only find out at the end whether it opens from inside. If it doesn’t? Reverse everything. Hours of crawling back through the coffin level, then ascending 80 metres up that same stretchy rope.

Mark had been thinking about this since before the trip. “Hopefully it will open,” he’d messaged, with a grimacing emoji doing some heavy lifting.

It opened. “The highlight for me,” Mark called it afterwards. Given the alternative, that might be the understatement of the year.

Outside, the cows were waiting. “Getting surrounded by a herd of cows was pretty intense,” Mark said. “They seemed really interested in the rigging.” He sent four photos as evidence. The cows do look suspicious.

Halfway through the coffin level, Mark was deep in “I’m glad I’ve done this but I’m not doing it again” territory.

By the time they’d retrieved the ropes at the surface, something had shifted. “That had changed to I’d probably do that again.” Type 2 fun doing what type 2 fun does.

Sam’s verdict: “It’s a great trip and I will do it again but make it a full day.”

The cows will presumably still be there.