Descent, the caving magazine had an article in the Dec 2022 issue (No 289) entitled Club huts of the dales. I was surprised to find a reference to the WMCEG “hut”:
A small building with no water or lighting, but bunks for 6, was occupied by the West Midlands CEG from approximately 1975 to 1986. It was situated on the west of the Kingsdale Rd 2km North of Thornton-in-Lonsdale, being rented from the farmer for £25 per year.
Another surprise was that the article credits me for the information – but I never visited that hut, it was after my time with WMCEG. I knew there was a hut and that it was very basic but that was all and I don’t recall telling the author about it.
However the article also makes reference to a couple of other huts we used (most of which which featured things like electricity, running water, even showers).
I used Brackenbottom, owned by Bradford PC, a few times including a week-long caving summer holiday. It was then that some of our number took a day off caving to do a parachute jump. I was sensible enough to avoid such dangerous activities (but it was beyond my budget too), so some of us went to the seaside. I may be conflating two different caver’s seaside trips but Morecombe Bay was one, we realised we were swimming close to a sewage outfall when we noticed “solids” in the water. The other (or was it the same?) we had to abandon the beach because a massive cloud of greenfly arrived, OK they don’t bite but they did land and walk on us to the extent that we risked being confused for the Jolly Green Giant, The Hulk or Shrek. If I recall the sleeping arrangement was a large padded platform, everyone slept together (in their own sleeping bags), we got fleas so went to a pharmacy and asked for flea powder, the pharmaist what kind of animal we wanted to treat and was not expecting the reply “us!”.
Red Rose C&PC at Bull Pot farm was another of our hosts. I’ll not use this platform to tell the story of “Danny and the egg” but my contemporaries will remember. Bull Pot farm is very remote, on Casterton Fell at the end of a 4km road from Casterton. At our Wednesday night planning meeting one of the drivers didn’t know the way so someone fetched a map. Not an OS map but a single sheet covering the whole country we all thought that would be no use, not likely to include a minor road to nowhere. We were wrong. From a map-makers perspective Casterton Fell is relatively featureless on a map of that scale so rather than leave a large blank area it named the only feature for miles around: Bullpot Farm!
The one I’d forgotten the name of was Airedal CC’s Fawber Farm near Horton in Ribblesdale, we used it a few times but it was towards the extreme end of the grotty scale. The “driveway” was a steep, deeply rutted muddy farm track and we had to get out and push…
Other huts mentioned in the fairly extensive article were rooms and outhouses associated with pubs. You’ll be surprised to hear that we frequented those premises too but not in search of accommodation
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