In August 1923 two young men, Christopher Francis Drake Long and J.H. Churchill, were spending a holiday together in the Yorkshire Dales. They were both students at Cambridge University, where both had taken up the study of geology as a hobby. Their enthusiasm for this science prompted them to follow up a discovery they made of a slight fissure on the slopes of Ingleborough. This, they reasoned, might be a former outlet of the underground stream that supplied the nearby village of Ingleton with water. Christopher Long decided to investigate. Wearing only his summer walking clothes of shirt and shorts, and lighting his way with candles stuck in the brim of his hat, he crawled into the low passage. Spurred on by the distant roar of water, he struggled over jagged rocks and through pools, until eventually he found himself at the foot of a waterfall. White Scar Cave had been discovered. He continued along a stream passage to a cascade and then returned to the surface to announce his find. On subsequent expeditions, Long explored as far as the subterranean lakes (now bypassed by Bagshaw Tunnel). Undeterred by the cold water, he swam across them. A massive boulder, subsequently nicknamed 'Big Bertha', lay wedged in the passage beyond. He squeezed past, only to find his path blocked by a boulder choke ( a jumbled mass of rocks). Long intended to open the cave to visitors, but in a fit of depression in September 1924 he committed suicide. The first manager of the cave, Tom Greenwood, found many further galleries and passages in the 1930s. In 1971, cavers led by John Russom literally dug their way upwards through the treacherously slippery and unstable boulder choke, and found themselves in a massive cavern. It was so vast that their helmet lamps could not penetrate the gloom to the far walls. The roof had great voids, or avens, which soared into mysterious darkness. Thousands of delicate straw stalactites hung in great curtains. They hurried back to the surface to break the news of this major discovery. Subsequent visits established that the cavern was over 330 feet long, and hence one of the largest known cave chambers in Britain. It was called the 'Battlefield Cavern' because the cavers, on seeing its boulder-strewn floor, imagined giants fighting there in prehistoric times. The name has stuck.