Rod's Pot is a limestone cave above

Burrington Combe Burrington Combe is a Carboniferous Limestone gorge near the village of Burrington, on the north side of the Mendip Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, in North Somerset, England. "Combe" or "coombe" is a word of Celtic origin found ...

in the

Mendip Hills The Mendip Hills (commonly called the Mendips) is a range of limestone hills to the south of Bristol and Bath in Somerset, England. Running from Weston-super-Mare and the Bristol Channel in the west to the Frome valley in the east, the hills ...

, in Somerset, England. The cave was first excavated in 1944 by the University of Bristol Spelæological Society. It is one of a line of swallets marking the junction of the Limestone shales with the Carboniferous Limestones where water running off the Old Red Sandstone of Blackdown finds its way underground. Further excavation has now linked Rod's Pot to nearby

Bath Swallet Bath Swallet is a karst cave in Burrington Combe on the Mendip Hills The Mendip Hills (commonly called the Mendips) is a range of limestone hills to the south of Bristol and Bath in Somerset, England. Running from Weston-super-Mare and t ...

. The cave was originally known as Pearce's Pot after Rodney Pearce.

Main features

Rod's Pot is formed mainly of vertical rift passages, probably in the original joints in the limestone which have been enlarged by water action. The north wall of the main chamber is a continuation of the main chamber in Read's Cave, a quarter mile to the west. The entry chamber divides into two passages about high and long. They merge again at the top of a deep vertical pothole which is a dead end. From the top of the pothole a long passage leads to the roof of the main chamber. The main chamber is about long, high and slopes down some . It contains a

stalagmite A stalagmite (, ; from the Greek , from , "dropping, trickling") is a type of rock formation that rises from the floor of a cave due to the accumulation of material deposited on the floor from ceiling drippings. Stalagmites are typically ...

pillar formation and several

stalactite A stalactite (, ; from the Greek 'stalaktos' ('dripping') via ''stalassein'' ('to drip') is a mineral formation that hangs from the ceiling of caves, hot springs, or man-made structures such as bridges and mines. Any material that is soluble an ...

curtains. A small hole leads to a smaller chamber about high in which is a stalactite curtain about long and which is translucent and coloured with stripes of reddish-brown deposits. A further passageway leads to the terminal pothole. At the base of the Bear Pit, a 3 metre deep chamber reached through a small hole halfway through the cave, a pool containing a small community of ''

Niphargus fontanus ''Niphargus'' is by far the largest genus of its family, the Niphargidae, and the largest of all freshwater amphipod genera. Usually, these animals inhabit caves or groundwater. They occur in western Eurasia, in regions that were not covered by ...

'' been found.

References

{{Mendip Hills Caves of the Mendip Hills Limestone caves Wild caves

Main features

See also

References