Dublin caving: Portrane caves

I was visiting Dublin for a conference, but managed to sneak out for an early morning exploration on one of the days. I had already skied in Dublin eleven years ago. But I had not been to a cave in Ireland! Are there any around? I found an article from the award-winning local cave photographer and author Robert Mulraney which said, "The first thing that can be said of the caves of Dublin is that, there are no caves in Dublin". However, it turns out there are some, and Robert goes through these in his article. The caves are not big.. but very interesting. And actually, they *are* big for someone coming from the land of thousands lakes and mini caves :-)

I should first say though that these caves are potentially dangerous, there are treacherous cliffs or the caves may fill with water suddenly due to tides. And of course there are all the usual dangers of caving. Take care. Do not even think of approaching them unless you know what you are doing. And contact locals first, I did that too. 

And I did get many warnings along the way. First off, as I exited my hotel in the around 6am, I wondered why the lifts were showing a do-not-enter sign, and then the fire horns started blazing. I ran down the stairs and ordered my taxi, and hoped everything was alright. I guess it was, the hotel was still standing when I came back.

And then there was a warning that I couldn't take my horse with me. Phew, thank goodness I left it at the parking lot:

Then there was a sign that the path may collapse. Ok, that's normal. But then I looked more carefully... it also warns about chemtrails :-)

In any case, enough about the warnings. I finally found the caves. 

There's actually several, I was able to visit six, but I think I missed the largest one that I believe is called Gloop Rift. Although it may have been impassable at the time due to tide. At least the entrance not was not obvious.

Two of the caves I visited were bigger, some tens of meters, and had nice cave forms. The first of these was called The Maze:

And the second was the Priest's Chamber:

The others were small, probably not proper caves by anyone else's standards :-) 

The caves are subject to the sea forces and erosion, but they are actually karst caves, formed through dissolution processes of limestone. Interestingly, Dublin has different types of limestone. I was north of Dublin, near Portrane. There the limestone is from the Ordovician period and is able to form caves, whereas elsewhere the limestone type doesn't tend to form caves as easily. Hence, there's really not much other caves in the Dublin area. 

I walked through the caves that I could see twice. And did a 3D scan of The Maze on my iPhone's lidar sensor. Then I felt like I had to leave, the water wasn't rising yet but I was on the wrong side of the tide when the clock has passed 8am and I didn't want to be in the narrow caves when the water would rise :-)

Here's the 3D model that scanned, first a snapshot of what it looks like:

The actual model is in GLTF format here for download, and you can rotate it on your browser here. You can see a short a video also below, but you get higher resolution if you rotate it yourself:

I used my Cave Outliner to convert the 3D model to a map. The full map in high resolution is in PDF format here. Here's the horizontal plane picture of that:

Note that the first side passage to the right of the entrance is fake, resulting from a scanning artifact where the iPhone's sensor double-recorded the entrance wall, thinking it was inside the cave. I also don't know if the left and right branches of the cave actually connect, but according to the model they do.

With the exception of those errors, the model is quite nice.

And here is the vertical view of the map:

It is interesting to compare the horizontal plane picture to the one footprint picture generated by the 3D scanning app, Polycam. Here it is for The Maze:

Thanks to Robert for the excellent article about Dublin's caving, the limestone  and for site intel. Maybe next time in Dublin we can meet, or somewhere else if our paths cross! Robert also has a related article about mines in the Dublin area.

The cave with most stalactites was The Maze, see the pictures below and at the top of this post and where I mentioned Maze earlier.

The cave with two levels, Priest's Chamber is shown below. I was afraid to climb to the second level, being alone. Even if there was a rope that I could have used as assist. It was quite nice though, with colors. See the pictures below:

Other views seen on the trip:

I also want to recommend the La Cave Wine Bar, an excellent restaurant with exactly the right underground atmosphere (link, and thanks Stephen for taking us there): 

Other small cavelets nearby, first one:

Second one:

Third one:

Fourth one:

Read more urban exploration stories from theurbanexplorer.net, and other underground stories from planetcaver.net. Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot or TGR. Photos and text (c) 2024 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.