Jarmo and I have been looking for a lost cave. The Finnish Caves book notes a rumour of the "Skevabackgrotta" cave in Kirkkonummi, but does not give exact location. And notes that the cave entrance has collapsed:
"xxx 1. Skevabackgrotta, Kirkkonummi, 2032 08 Kirkkonummi, x=6666,xx, y=2526,yy. 2.4. Längstrandin maalla. Suuakko on romahtanut. EI TARK."This is difficult to interpret, but the location points to somewhere north of the Peuramaa ski area. This is close to the Högberget cave. I've always had a suspicion that the Högberget cave might be a beach cave rather than ice age cave, now lifted 30 meters higher due to rising ground in the last 10 000 years. Could the Skevabackgrotta be a similar one?
So I figured I'd systematically search the nearby areas, as the indicated coordinates are only one km2. And given the theory about the beach cave, I decided to follow the same 25-30 meter height contour line in the forests. I didn't find much on my first search, but the next day Jarmo joined the search party.
The algorithm did seem to pay off. In the same height level there were actually many vertical and horizontal cracks, and some of them were equally worn as the Högberget cave.
We found one clear cave, a horizontal crack with two cave parts each able to hold one person. Ok, not much, a really small cave, perhaps not listed as a cave by anybody else than us. And this was also not the cave we were looking for, as it had not collapsed.
There was another horizontal cave in the middle of a larger cliff face. It was easily reachable still, but turned out to be small. Maybe, just maybe, when the ice and water clears in the summer it becomes big enough for a person to fit in.
We found a vertical crack that I could see well enough into, did it have a small cave at the top or not? I climbed a fallen tree to see better, but the rotten tree didn't really enable me to go sufficiently high. Still, we think there's no opening here.
But finally, we found a vertical crack that goes through a section of a cliff, with both ends accessible. The crack is small, and filled with stones. On one end there's a clear devil's churn, and the other end is also worn by some forces. On the devil's churn end, it is, however, possible to squeeze into the crack. At first, it didn't feel possible, but then I took a few layers of clothing off, and was able to make it in.
This part of the crack has a round boulder hanging high in the crack, and a few meters forward the crack becomes filled with lodged boulders and rocks. If those rocks were higher up some day, this would have been a small cave. Perhaps sometime in the past the whole crack was free, and one might have been able to go through the 5-10 meters?
Difficult to tell. Is this Skevabackgrottan? The best hint that it might be comes from Jarmo, who notes that we are standing on the Skevabacken cliff... maybe... and I'm pretty sure there's nothing else on this hill. Unless it has been completely levelled and destroyed. Who knows, but I think this is at least with some likelihood the right place. What the cave looked like 100 or 10000 years ago, we don't know.
Here are some more pictures and exact locations. The horizontal crack on the big cliff (coordinates N 60.10512231 E 24.47254300):
The small horizontal crack and a two part cave (coordinates N 60.10511529 E 24.47416900):
The vertical crack with a possible (unlikely) cave at the top (coordinates N 60.10528759 E 24.47533234):
The devil's churn cave (coordinates N 60.10566582 E 24.47646343):
At the very end of this cave:
Reducing clothing to fit in:
On the walk we also saw an odd boulder with stones next to it that are either natural, or were bing quarried somewhere:
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