Trapped In A Cave FULL Of Spiders

It was a mild spring evening in Bristol and me and some friends were about to climb down into a vast underground labyrinth of tunnels which are hidden beneath the city.

The usually secure, secret entrance had been bust open and was left hanging on its hinges when we arrived, so we took the opportunity to take a look. Of course we were properly kitted out with lights, over-clothes, helmets and boots.

Getting in wasn't going to be easy, it required us to climb dozens of ladders spanning the height of a 200 foot access shaft. To make the climb safer, the shaft was divided into several chambers, one on top of the other. This meant the maintenance workers entering the tunnel could never fall more than a few feet. To make it even safer, the ladders were positioned to stop you being able to fall off backwards, so as you climbed down your back was against the wall of the concrete shaft.

I was first down the ladder in to the top chamber, the air was still warm just a few meters from the surface. I stood waiting for the others to join me in the darkness. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light from my head light, I noticed a spider in front of me on the wall.

It was quite big and nasty looking... then looking around I noticed that he wasn't alone. There spiders covering all of the walls! It was like something from the Temple Of Doom.

Then I had the horrible realisation that when I'd climbed down the ladder my back had been scraping down the wall of the chamber. I started checking my self for spiders while screaming up at my friends to warn them. Were there spiders on my back? What about the ladder itself, have spiders crawled up my sleeves?

My fear was more greatly enhanced then when a drop of water fell on to my head, in panic I just assumed it was a spider. I decided not to wait for the others and got down to the next level instead, the spiders were there too! So I shot down another level to safety.

They say the best way to get over a fear is to face it... well no, the worst thing was that we climbed down through the rest of the 12 chambers and there was no other way out. I was no happier about climbing back up through the top spider infested chambers on the way out.

The thing is climbing the best part of 200 foot of ladder means you're pretty tired by the time you get to the top and I didn't want to be struggling through the spider chambers, so the level before I stopped and took a big long rest to get my energy back so that I could shoot up to safety as quickly as possible and shake myself off in the sunlight.

These spiders I encountered are actually some of the biggest spiders in the UK. They were the European cave spider, meta menardi, also known as the "orbweaving cave spider."

These evil little things are photophobic which is why they live in caves and tunnels, they're often spotted in railway tunnels and mines as they're the kind of places which are more frequently visited by humans.

It's not just me who didn't like this particular breed of spiders, especially in large numbers. In 2001 British Telecom engineers working in the grounds of Windsor Castle discovered a colony of meta menardi living in the manholes. You can forgive the engineers for describing there as "swarms of aggressive spiders, up to 9cm in size." This lead to the press reporting an infestation of venomous spiders at Windsor Castle.

In reality, this spider is not venomous and only reaches roughly a 5cm leg span and 1.5cm body length... although, that's still to big as far as I'm concerned.