Events
Guest Speaker Events
We are hosting a series of Guest Speaker Events during 2026 around the theme of the great Outdoors.
Tickets £5.00 are available on TicketSource
https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/fraserhall
(buying the tickets on TicketSource helps us with numbers for catering)
Tea/coffee and cakes will be available for sale, with proceeds and donations shared between the speaker’s chosen charity and Fraser Hall.
Guest speakers in 2026
On Saturday June 20th at 3pm Michael Hale of the Cave Rescue Organisation (based in Clapham) will be telling us about his many years volunteering with the CRO, including the caves and fells around us.
A brief introduction to the talk has been provided by Michael:
The Yorkshire Dales contains some of the most stunning limestone scenery in the whole of the British Isles. For this reason, it has attracted over many years, many people to the area to explore the hills for walking, the cliffs, crags and gorges for climbing and especially the caves for discovering and exploring. The fells just north of Cowan Bridge are riddled with caves and currently contain the longest cave system in Britain at over 55 miles of passages which are being extended at a prolific rate year by year. The caves of the Yorkshire Dales are challenging to explore. They tend to be vertical in nature, that is they are deep potholes that follow active streamways as they go underground and so are dangerously wet, cold and require specialised skills to safely explore. They are also fascinating to those that enjoy the challenge.
The people who explore these caves in this area have realised that the only people who are going to come to their assistance in the event of an accident or trapping or similar are the very same people who explore them in the first place. Thus, following a tragic accident in a nearby local cave where the local cavers had to recover a fatally injured person the Cave Rescue Organisation was established. This was in 1937 and the Organisation has carried on since then increasing in personnel, skills, specialist equipment and experience.
Caving became safer. Equipment, training, knowledge and many other factors advanced to the stage where cave rescues are few and far between. At one time around the 70s, 80s and 90s CRO would have about 50 call outs to caves a year. These days we rarely get more than five and most of those are to sheep or dogs that have taken up caving.
This is countered by the increase in popularity of fell walking in the region and CRO has become the Mountain Rescue Team for the Three Peaks region. We always were available to help on the fells but were not called on to assist to the extent we are now. This is evidenced by the fact that we have routinely been called out, over the last ten years to approximately 90 to 100 fell incidents each year.
We have also acknowledged that there are several largish rivers in our region that can occasionally result in people becoming endangered and so we also have a water rescue team who are fully trained and equipped to deal with swift water incidents.
Our base is in Clapham, and we only recruit experienced cavers, walkers and climbers from a ten-mile radius of Clapham as full team members.
The team works with the ambulance service and the police, and we are tasked to incidents by either agency.
The CRO is affiliated to the Mountain Rescue (England and Wales) where we are in the top ten of the busiest teams in the UK and certainly the one with the biggest range of specialised skill sets.
The CRO is a charity run by volunteers and depends on public donations for its finance. We are a registered Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) number 1201338.
My name is Michael Hale. I have been a member of the Cave Rescue Organisation since I moved up to the Dales over 40 years ago. In that time, I have held many positions within the team. I have been at different times the Training Officer, Equipment Officer, Underground Controller and over the last ten years Team Leader. I have experience of all aspects of rescue and since accurate recording of attendances to callouts have been conducted, I have probably been on about two thousand shouts.
I worked for twenty years at Westmorland General Hospital, I have walked all the Scottish Munroes and all the Wainwrights and many long-distance trails and been on several caving expeditions to some of the deepest caves of the world sometimes involving being underground for three or fours days at a time. I have recently retired from CRO to allow the younger people to run up the hills
The Great Outdoors
