Noon's Hole 1.53

Noon's Hole lies about 5 km northwest of the centre of Boho, in the townland of Old Barr in the parish of Devenish, County Fermanagh, close to the border with Boho parish. The cave is under part of the escarpment on the east side of the Glenade Sandstone uplands. At 81m, this pothole was thought to have the deepest shaft in Ireland, but this honour was passed to the nearby Reyfad Pot, which contains an entrance shaft of 88m. The continuation of the cave system contains 3.7km of passage, and it connects to the resurgence at Arch Cave through three cave dives, making this system the 8th deepest in Ireland, at 108m.Noon's Hole was previously called "Sumera", meaning "abyss", but gained notoriety and a new name in the 1820s, following the notorious murder of Dominick Noone, whose body was thrown into the cave. Ordnance Survey maps still use both names.ExplorationA Sumera is a bottomless pit, and locals initially treated Noon's Hole as a supernatural area, viewing it with suspicion and fear. However, in August 1895, the French cave explorer Édouard-Alfred Martel explored the cave for the first time, descending to 20m. It was not until 1912 that a group called the Yorkshire Ramblers reached the bottom. Not discouraged by their equipment not having arrived from England, they made the descent of the complex 78m shaft using a 35m long rope ladder built from materials purchased from Fermanagh ships chandlers and timber merchants, hauling it up and down from the surface when the explorers found ledges to stand on. All they found at the bottom was a short passage leading to a sump. During the Easter of 1970, a group from the University of Leeds Speleological Association investigated the parallel shafts, and found that one led into 400m of passages they named the After-Noon Series.