So she and partner Stuart booked a £1,200 holiday on the Greek island of Kos, and paid an extra £500 for the travel company to organise the wedding.About 25 friends and relatives joined them in the local town’s register office for the simple ceremony followed by a harbour boat ride. “To get married in the UK you have to plan everything a year in advance,” said Mrs Kirk. “Most weddings cost a fortune and are still very ordinary.” The Kirks’ Greek wedding cost them about £2,000.Overseas weddings are proving so popular that tour operators now produce specialist brochures.”Marrying abroad is much cheaper than in UK,” said a spokeswoman for First Choice. “Couples can get married in the Caribbean from as little as £800, and that includes the hotel and the honeymoon.”Couples bring with them not just the family but the cake, the Champagne and even flowers.”. Thousands of people heading for the coast, sporting events and music festivals at the start of the hottest weekend of the year contributed to road and rail chaos yesterday. The underground pool in which an army cadet drowned last week while caving in the Brecon Beacons looks inviting.

It is only a few yards to the cave exit, and plenty of sunlight comes through from the outside. The water’s surface, though not exactly smooth, is far from a raging torrent. The overhanging tendrils of trees help to create an idyllic effect You could call it a lagoon – but a lethal one. You could call it a lagoon – but a lethal one.
With the death of 17-year-old Kevin Sharman, the Porth-yr-Ogof cave, about 10 miles south-west of Brecon, claimed its 11th victim in 30 years, 10 of them in the so-called resurgence pool, the short stretch of water where Kevin was lost.Toby Dryden, one of the members of the West Brecon Cave Rescue Organisation called out last Monday, returned with me to the spot on the riverbank from where a diver went in to find the missing cadet.”The cave is narrow at surface level,” Mr Dryden explained, “but you only have to go underwater a couple of feet and it widens out That’s what creates the swirling currents. You wouldn’t know they were there until you had got in.”In heavy caving gear and without a life jacket – Kevin Sharman was not wearing one, according to Mr Dryden – you would have little chance.No visitor to Porth-yr-Ogof could say they weren’t warned.

The resurgence pool is a place of “extreme danger”, say signs in the car park above the cave and on the cave walls. The words “Many people have drowned here” reiterate the message. In training, said Mr Dryden, local instructors have it “hammered home” to them that they are never to take groups anywhere near it. Yet something lures people on.Mr Dryden, a softly spoken 47-year-old and a cave rescuer in the area since the 1980s, told me he had once been through the pool himself, about 20 years ago. “I wore a wetsuit and a buoyancy aid, and was tied to a rope I was with experienced cavers. But it was still frightening.” He would never do it again.Confronting fears is all part of caving’s appeal. No unknown is quite so compelling as that which lurks underground, and as Mr Dryden and I explored the dripping limestone chambers of Porth-yr-Ogof, surrounded by 100,000- year-old rock formations, he told me that he regularly takes parties of youngsters round who arrive in a state of trepidation and leave the cave singing and laughing.Mr Dryden said he had been terrified when, as a nine-year-old, he was first taken to a cave, and had to be led out in tears.