Man rescured from Fermanagh cave

In tricky conditions volunteers worked through the night to rescue a man stuck in a cave in Fermanagh at the weekend.

With temperatures dipping and wet weather closing in, it took five local volunteers from the Irish Cave Rescue Organisation (ICRO) six hours to free a man, in his 20s, who had become too tired to progress any further within a system on the northern side of Cuilcagh Mountain.

The Marlbank is the third deepest and longest in Northern Ireland and the seventh longest and deepest in Ireland.

The man was part of a group and members were on the return leg of a planned caving trip when the alarm was first raised shortly before 9pm on Saturday night, February 15.

Local ICRO volunteers arrived soon after, with it soon clear that the alert need to be extended across Ireland.

Volunteers from both north and south of the border attended to assist the operation, travelling from as far as Larne, Belfast, Dublin, and Clare.

Together they worked quickly to get to the stricken man to assess his condition.

They established a so-called “hot point” underground where volunteers warmed and fed the man. Meanwhile, above ground, rock breaking and rescue rigging teams engineered a bypass to a “constricted section” of passage near the cave entrance. This allowed the man to be safely hauled up vertically with ropes via the new route to the surface at 3:15am.

“The caver was brought safely to the surface and the team was stood down at 4am on Sunday morning. No injuries were reported,” said the ICRO in a post shared online.

The ICRO meanwhile thanked all of its volunteers for travelling through the night and assisting with this successful rescue.