Scott Pot Cave

V.H. Gartz, Extract from SASA Bulletin 1989 Vol 30

This cave is located in the De Hoop Nature Reserve and was surveyed in October 1988 by Jasper Horrell and myself. It is named for Ann Scott, the wife of the Resident Manager, who spotted the entrance while riding on horseback between the access road from the hardeduine and the the vlei. The cave has to be entered using a ladder or some other device to negotiate the approximately 10 metre deep shaft. The cave is a “crawly" one since the average height is only about 0.5 metres. On top of that the floor of the cave is covered with jagged limestone pebbles and boulders which do not make surveying the cave a great pleasure.

The cave passage has a gentle but steady dip in a northerly direction until towards the end it gets too narrow to continue. Generally the passage is in the order of a few metres wide but the entrance “chamber” has a maximum diameter of about 8 metres. The length of the cave is only about 25 metres. I am still waiting for the “big one" at De Hoop. An interesting feature of this cave (and also a number of the other caves in the De Hoop Nature Reserve) is that it has more-or-less cylindrical shafts extending upwards towards the surface. Some of them were probably formed from the surface downwards but others appear to have formed from inside the cave upwards towards the surface. Their diameter also varies from about 0.2 metres up to perhaps 1 metre (in some of the other caves), One of these shafts in Scott Pot is blocked with rubble and although some SASA members tried their hand at digging (from above as well as from below - a precarious task since sand grains enter your nasal passages and the cornea also suffers a bit) more excavations will have to be made in order to open up the second entrance.