History
The cave was discovered in 1952 by J. M. Dickenson and Brian Varley of Craven Pothole Club, an English caving club based in the Yorkshire Dales. The cave quickly became a classic caving trip for visiting cavers. Entry was arduous, requiring a long, difficult crawl.
In 1990, the land on which the cave is located was purchased by John and Helen Browne. The couple immediately embarked on an effort to develop the cave as a show cave. This provoked a reaction from the Speleological Union of Ireland who feared the 30-metre (98 ft) shaft that would have to be blasted to access the cave would damage the stalactite. They also objected to the fact that the caving trip would be lost to cavers and that the cave was a short artificial trip with only one feature. After an extended period of court proceedings, financing and development, the cave was opened to the public as a show cave in 2006, subject to the conditions of not having a visitor centre on site and restricting visitor numbers. No blasting was allowed to construct the entrance shaft. The developers instead used as system whereby a hole was drilled and an air expander placed in the hole to break the rock. Visitors to the cave must be taken from Doolin village by bus to the site where there are no surface installations.
In 2009 the cave owners made a planning application (their fifth in almost twenty years) to build a visitor center on site citing the limitations of having to transport people to the site by bus. Some 12,000 people visit the cave every year, well below the number required to break even.
The development of Pol an Ionain has been criticised for being environmentally damaging and for being devoid of any features beside the Great Stalactite.
Read more about this topic: Pol An Ionain
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)