Qualla: Shannon Cave

Shannon Cave: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In October 1980, the Reverend George Pitt was pinned beneath collapsing boulders deep underground, the icy stream he had been wading through still rushing past his trapped body. Above him, somewhere across the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, his fellow cavers organized one of the largest underground rescue efforts ever mounted in Ireland. Ten hours later, Pitt emerged alive. Fifteen years after that, the entrance he had helped discover collapsed for good, sealing off five kilometres of cave passages that had taken a decade to map. To this day, the only way in is from the other side of the border.

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Shannon Cave: A Cave That Crosses Countries

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Shannon Cave is a geological curiosity that ignores politics. Its entrance sits high in the moors of County Fermanagh, in Northern Ireland, but the vast majority of its passages snake beneath fields and bog in County Cavan, in the Republic of Ireland. At 130 metres of vertical de...

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Shannon Cave: Discovery in a Glacial Pile

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When members of the Reyfad Group first broke through into the cave in August 1980, they were squeezing through what cavers politely call glacial fill. In plain English, it was a treacherous pile of unstable rubble, the leftover debris from ice age glaciers that had buried the ori...

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Shannon Cave: The Rescue and the Sealed Door

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The October 1980 accident that trapped Pitt happened at a feature the cavers nicknamed George's Choke, a name that stuck after the rescue. The Pollahune entrance was always temperamental, dropping rocks onto cavers as they passed beneath it. In 1995 it finally gave up entirely. T...

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Shannon Cave: Diving Back In

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Reconnecting Polltullyard to the rest of Shannon Cave required cave divers. The two systems lay only sixty metres apart on the survey, separated by water and rock. Divers pushed through forty metres of flooded passage, surfaced on the far side, and made voice contact with dry cav...

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Shannon Cave: The Cave as Art

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In November 2023, Shannon Cave made an unlikely appearance at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Buried in the Rock, a virtual reality experience created by ScanLAB Projects, premiered at IDFA using point cloud scans of the descent into Polltullyard. Viewers w...

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Shannon Cave: Borderlands Above and Below

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The area above Shannon Cave is a quiet stretch of upland Ireland, all heather and bog and scattered farms. The Marlbank district of Fermanagh climbs toward the Cuilcagh Mountains, while the Cavan side rolls south toward Swanlinbar. Walkers on the moors can pass directly over pass...

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