[1] The main entrance into Short Cave is at the end of a shallow valley where a small hole drops into a stream passage.

[4] Scrambling down the eastern side, a ledge is reached where an 8 metres (26 ft) pitch lands at the end of the traverse from Short Drop Cave.

The water from Short Drop soon enters from the right, and a large collapse from Ash Tree Hole on the surface is passed on the left.

The final one lands in a chamber with a sump pool, which is a window into the underwater passages carrying water from Notts Pot to the resurgence at Leck Beck Head.

[8] Glasfurd's Chamber is thought to be part of a major phreatic passage formed some 350,000 years ago, that took water from a major sink at Rumbling Hole, through Death's Head Hole and Glasfurd's Chamber, and hence to a resurgence in the Leck Beck valley some 100 metres (330 ft) above the current resurgence which is now covered with glacial till.

[9] The first recorded exploration of the Gavel Pot - Short Drop system was in 1885, when Messrs. W. Eckroyd, Geoffrey and Cuthbert Hastings descended one of the entrances in the Gavel Pot shakehole, and explored Short Drop Cave for a considerable distance upstream, using a ladder constructed out of iron piping and rope to scale the 5-metre (16 ft) high waterfall.

[15] The main passages in Gavel Pot were first explored in 1970, when the Northern Pennine Club excavated a shaft in the final chamber.

Geoff Yeadon descended the sump to a depth of 41 metres (135 ft) in 1974,[17] and the shaft was finally bottomed in 1985 by Rob Palmer.

[18] The downstream underwater connection with Lost Johns' Cave was made by Bob Churcher in 1975,[19] and with Pippikin Pot in 1989 by Geoff Yeadon.