30 April 2021
The universal appeal of secret passage stories has led to rumours that the undersides of entire townscapes including Exeter, Northampton, Peterborough, Newark, Shrewsbury, Carmarthen, Dublin, Norwich, Sheffield, Knaresborough and Edinburgh are absolutely littered with secret tunnels connecting a myriad of buildings. There does not seem to be a corner of the British Isles which does not have tunnel folklore attached to it – literally every hamlet, village, town and city can provide an example of the genre.
We have already covered two such stories on this blog. Initially, we tackled reports of a secret passage between a mediaeval priory and manor house at Stone (Staffordshire). Latterly, we interrogated the recent discovery of an underground feature at Tintern (Monmouthshire). At the risk of becoming ‘that secret passages blog’ (which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing – we’ll almost certainly return to the subject again), I shall be collaborating on this post with my dear friend Sophie Garrett, an avid local historian and photographer, to look at claims relating to subterranean Guildford.
Guildford: A Honeycombed Town?
First settled in the early mediaeval period, Guildford occupies a strategic position at a narrow gap in the North Downs. The River Wey flows through this gap, and while the initial settlement would have been based near the banks of the river, rapid expansion during the mediaeval period created a compact town centred upon the lower slopes of the North Downs ridge.
For many years Guildford’s online discussion forums have been peppered with threads discussing a myriad of tunnels alleged to lie beneath the town. These have included proposed links between the Royal Grammar School and Allen House or the Star Inn and Holy Trinity & St Mary’s church. Most attention is focused on Guildford Castle which is said to be connected to various landmarks including, but not limited to, the Angel Hotel, King’s Head, Royal Oak, NatWest Bank, St Catherine’s Chapel and Racks Close Quarry.
The geology of Guildford is complex – the town is spread across bands of chalk, gravel, sandstone and London Clay, along with superficial silt and sand deposits – but the majority of the historic centre stands upon solid chalk, and it is this very material which has spawned so many of the myths surrounding the subterranean world of the town.
In common with many parts of the North Downs, the landscape around Guildford is pitted with chalk quarries. Towering cliffs of white chalk invite the passer-by to consider the fact that our ancestors were prone to excavating this landscape. Meanwhile, the hilly topography and firm bedrock of the town centre invites questions of what may lie beneath.
True to expectations, there is genuine evidence of underground chalk quarrying on the fringes of the historic town centre. Guildford has an extensive system of mediaeval quarries at Racks Close and there are also later excavations at Foxenden Quarry (which were converted into air raid shelters during the Second World War). Both sites have been well documented, and while the quarry tunnels are extensive, they are not as wide-ranging as local tales would have us believe. Nor do they connect up with any kind of interlinked system of secret passageways beneath the town – as commenters on social media often claim.
Comprehensive maps, made in 1871, show the relatively limited extent of the Racks Close quarry tunnels, as well as their footprint beneath the surface, but speculation continues. There has been no public access to Racks Close since the Second World War and, since 2008, the entrance has been sealed with concrete and buried beneath undergrowth. However, despite the known history, both of the genuine quarry excavations in the town (and a host of entirely imaginary tunnels) have been variously explained as relating to escape routes from the castle, passages to assist the movements of persecuted Catholic priests and the transportation of prisoners, shelters from invading forces, ‘pilgrim tunnels’, smuggler’s delvings, shortcuts to the local pubs, a quick route for delivery of cordite from Chilworth gunpowder mills (as the river was ‘too slow’), easy access to King John’s wine cellars, and, most colourfully of all, routes to allow the mistresses of the aristocracy to visit their paramours!
The castle has been intimately linked to Racks Close in the popular imagination. However, whilst the castle keep is located relatively near to the tunnel entrance (around 140m as the crow flies), the entrance is located outside the castle walls. There is no evidence of an underground link between the tunnels and the castle grounds. The tunnels themselves are at a datum level over 50 metres below the castle’s great tower and they do not even come close to extending beneath it.
Another common focus of discussion is the historic High Street itself. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the firm clunch chalk from the Racks Close quarry was used in the construction of undercrofts or cellars beneath the buildings. As semi-basement spaces, these undercrofts were used as merchants shops and two well-preserved examples remain beneath numbers 72/74 and 91 (the Angel Hotel) on opposite sides of the High Street. While they undoubtedly have a mysterious atmosphere – with the Angel Hotel undercroft frequently being mischaracterised as a ‘crypt’ – there is no evidence of these spaces having been interlinked by any form of passageway beneath the street.
Despite this, one of the more frequent myths surrounding the town is that of ‘tunnels beneath the High Street’. The origin of these myths is clear to see: in addition to the undercrofts and a subterranean space beneath numbers 50-52 which is believed to be the remains of a 12th Century Jewish Torah reading room, several of the High Street shops do indeed have cellars which extend beyond the shop front and beneath the pavement. Undoubtedly many of the High Street buildings would also have had coal holes, although sadly very few of these remain visible on the surface, with most having disappeared beneath the modern paving slabs.
Reports are plentiful from residents who have worked in the shops on the High Street and remember seeing ‘blocked-up doorways’ or ‘dark, barred passageways’ heading beneath the street. Some have even gone so far as to claim that they’ve heard of ‘a whole street’ running beneath the High Street with road signs on the walls: ‘even a square with a market cross’. However, despite archaeological investigation of many of these cellars, renovation work on buildings, and regular excavation of the High Street itself over the decades – including extensive works in 2016, during which the cobbling was relaid and drainage system replaced – no evidence has ever been found of tunnels crossing beneath the famous setts.
While discussion of secret tunnels has simmered on social media over the years, it was truly reignited in early 2020 with the discovery of a mediaeval cave shrine at St Catherine’s Chapel, 1km to the south of the town centre. St Catherine’s lies upon different underlying geology. The soft sandstone of the hill lends itself to natural weathering, and the ground is pitted with an assortment of nooks, crannies and shallow caves, giving a rather ‘Swiss Cheese’-like impression to the passer-by. While some of these caves are deep enough to climb into, only the cave revealed by the 2020 landslip has been confirmed to be of man-made origin. Yet even the caves of St Catherine’s aren’t immune to the powers of urban myth, with one social media commenter memorably asserting that they are part of a 6 kilometre cordite-transportation tunnel all the way from Chilworth Gunpowder Mills to Guildford town centre.
A Voice of Reason
The threads of Guildford’s discussion forums are punctuated with the knowledgeable commentary of Philip Hutchinson – a dedicated local historian, author and the custodian of Guildford Castle. Philip has relentlessly articulated that the reality of subterranean Guildford is rather less romantic than many of the stories seem to indicate. Along with the features mentioned above, other verified ‘tunnel-like’ features in the town include former public toilets, a Victorian ice-house vaults beneath Quarry Street which are now in use as a Millennium time capsule, and a very short overground passage (more of a covered alleyway) leading between the Guildhall and the former police station on North Street.
Despite these rather mundane realities, many still remain beguiled by the potential for lengthy underground secret passages. The most protracted of these is a supposed tunnel stretching between the early seventeenth century Abbott’s Hospital and the greensand mines known as the Smuggler’s Storehouses at Compton. This proposed passage would be approximately 4.6 miles (7.5 kilometres) long and would have to drop around 50 metres in contour to be driven beneath the River Wey before rising to a similar height on the opposite side of the valley. The impracticality of such a construction project is staggering. Why would such a tunnel actually be required? How would such a vast construction project be kept secret? Where would the spoil be put? How would the passage be maintained, ventilated and kept dry? How on earth would pre-modern engineers have managed to tunnel beneath the River Wey to drive a passage to Compton – almost five miles away – on the other side of the river?
Regardless of such critique, some remain puzzlingly belligerent in the face of the sheer unlikely nature of the tales. One user of a discussion forum stated outright that: ‘Many experts have unfortunately a linear way of thinking… Experts believe they are never wrong and don’t like it when they are.’ Shades of Michael Gove’s now-infamous (and debunked) anti-intellectual statement here.
Philip Hutchinson may have a tough time of firefighting secret passage stories, but he was still keen to discuss the legends of Guildford tunnels when contacted during the summer of 2020. He related that ‘Guildford owes much of its historical flaws to the historian and eventual honorary ‘Town Remembrancer’, George Williamson’, going on to say that, ‘He was a prolific author on the history of Guildford and a great deal of his writings were fanciful to say the least. With no accurate records to rely on, and in an era where the romantic always triumphed over the factual, the legends were printed as fact in the absence of anything tangible.’
Indeed, this could not be shown more clearly than in the popular legend of “King John’s Wine Cellars” which can only be traced back as far as Williamson’s 1930 book The Guildford Caverns. Williamson devoted an extensive section to historic records of wine being transported to and stored at Guildford Castle, asserting that the thirteenth century cellars – reportedly being located ‘near’ to the castle rather than directly beneath it – were surely the quarry tunnels at Rack’s Close. However, precedents from contemporary sites including Clarendon Palace (Wiltshire) would suggest that it would certainly be safer and more convenient to locate these cellars within the castle walls rather than outside them. Wine was, after all, a very valuable commodity.
With the Rack’s Close quarry being the only known subterranean space near to the castle, it is easy to see how Williamson may have leapt to his conclusion at the time of writing. However, investigation of the castle grounds in more recent years has provided a reality check: excavations in 1993 uncovered the remains of a vaulted thirteenth century chamber beneath Castle Cliffe Gardens, just inside Castle Arch. This, rather than the quarry tunnels, is now believed to be the wine cellar of legend.
This particularly boozy myth is not the only one to arise from Williamson’s book. During a section on the Great War he recounted that it was ‘suggested’ that the Rack’s Close quarry tunnels might have been used for the storage of munitions. He stated that a tunnel ‘might be made from the Northern side of the Hog’s Back to connect at a level with the caves and bring them into practical use’ (Williamson 1930, 18). Needless to say, this proposed tunnel – which would have had to descend from the ridge of the Hog’s Back, dip beneath the soft silt of River Wey, and travel 2km to rise again to reach the level of the quarry on the other side of the valley – never came to fruition. However, the myths of secret passageways connecting the castle to places on the other side of the river valley persist to this day.
A Family Affair
Tunnel stories are not rare, but the vast majority are reported second hand. It is very rare for the person that claimed to have found a genuine secret passage to be the one who reported it alongside hard evidence. Anecdotal reports of discoveries include: ‘a neighbour recalled seeing some form of tunnel in the garden of an adjacent house’ which apparently linked a mediaeval house to a priory a quarter of a mile away. Family members and those close to us play an incredibly strong role in the transmission of such stories – examples of this include the report of: ‘my sister’s friend’ having discovered a tunnel which allegedly connected a Hertfordshire house to a castle; or of a West Midlands tunnel said to run between two manor houses which: ‘According to my nan, there was an entrance, since collapsed, in her garden.’ Hutchinson has noted that these types of tales are ‘firmly adhered to by certain proponents who appear to value their archaic family stories over fact: “Grandad couldn’t be wrong – how dare you!”’
One of the great issues with such accounts is that they are not from primary sources and are usually given a long time after the proposed events. There is a distance in time prior to the repetition of the story that is repeatedly encompassed by phrases such as: ‘someone that I know has a memory of playing in the tunnel as a child’ or ‘someone who lived there as a child remembered walking along part of it’. The great cataloguer of secret passages, Jeremy Errand, noted that: ‘The existence of many passages is vouched for only by the memories of boyhood exploration’ (Errand 1974, 105). This takes us right back into an age of frolicking innocence as opposed to sound archaeological evidence.
Buildings Archaeology
Buildings archaeology is key here. The discipline relies upon the careful observation, recording and assessment of the physical remains of material culture which are considered alongside documentary sources (where available). While documentary evidence does exist of the genuine subterranean spaces mentioned above, none of the multitude of other stories of tunnels wandering between various landmarks around Guildford can be seriously authenticated through reference to hard evidence.
It is completely accepted that underground structures do exist in many settlements. However, when the reality of a tunnels is tested, it usually proves to be extremely practical. A number of supposed secret passages have been investigated in Eastbourne (East Sussex) by archaeologist Jo Seaman. He found their origins to be variously a coal bunker, privy shafts, drains and a merchant’s cellar. Investigative work at other towns including Taunton and Frome (Somerset) have very much aligned with Seaman’s prosaic findings and include rediscoveries of wells, ice houses and public toilets rather than secret passages.
In many cases historic tunnels provide access for the movement of goods. A short, brick-lined, post-mediaeval service tunnel connects the kitchen block to the great tower at Ashby Castle (Leicestershire). A similar tunnel allowed access to the kitchens at Wardour Castle (Wiltshire). At Wollaton Hall (Nottinghamshire) a rock-cut tunnel connects the wine cellars to a natural spring. Equally prosaic are the multitude of cellars, dwellings, malt kilns, tanneries, storage spaces, wells, drains and cisterns cut into the sandstone beneath many buildings in Nottingham (Waltham 1992). Some of the Nottingham caves started off as sand mines – analogous with some of the delvings noted at Guildford or elsewhere at Little Thurrock (Essex) where mediaeval chalk mines (known as deneholes) survive (Clayton 2015, 13).
If more exciting origins for subterranean passages are truly required, then the dedicated tunnel-hunter might look towards the archaeological evidence of mines excavated during the 1174 siege of Bungay Castle (Suffolk) and 1216 siege of Dover Castle (Kent). Most impressive of all is the extant mine and break-through of a defensive countermine from the 1547 siege of St Andrew’s Castle (Fife) (Wiggins 2003, 13-16, 26-28).
Myth vs Reality in the Age of Social Media
In summary, many ‘secret underground passageway’ myths are not without some kind of basis in fact. In Guildford, the quarry tunnels at Racks Close do exist. Many shops do indeed have small cellars which extend beneath the pavement of the High Street. St Catherine’s Hill is indeed pockmarked by small caves and crevices. It is an established fact that there are plenty of subterranean spaces in Guildford: quarry tunnels, caves, cellars, drains, wells, vaults and ice houses. Practical, useful spaces.
However, decades of imagination, word of mouth, schooldays tales and the more recent advent of social media have enabled these features to grow, beyond their rather mundane reality, into the realm of urban myth. Quarry tunnels, limited in their extent, become secret escape routes from the castle. Cellars become subterranean passageways. And in a town so interlinked by a fantastical network of underground pathways, why shouldn’t there be one connecting a pub with the church down the road, or providing a shortcut to the nearest golf course?
Ultimately, an element of reality has to be injected into proceedings. Why would the king store his wine in a still-operational quarry when ample money and resources were available to construct a dedicated cellar within the security of the castle walls? Why would a town need an entire shopping street beneath the High Street (complete with a market cross!) when plenty of space was available to construct one above ground? Why would these tunnels have been constructed and maintained? Would it have been worth all the effort?
In this age of social media, it is all too easy for rumors such as these to take flight, bypass urban myth status entirely, and become fully-fledged ‘alternative facts’.
References
Clayton, A., 2015, Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore and Fact. Accumulator Press. London, Hastings & Cosmopli.
Errand, J., Secret Passages and Hiding Places. David & Charles. London.
Waltham, T., 1992 (2018 edition), Sandstone Caves of Nottingham. East Midlands Geological Society. Nottingham.
Wiggins, K., 2003, Siege Mines and Underground Warfare. Shire. Princes Risborough.
Williamson, G., 1930, The Guildford Caverns. Woodbridge Press. Guildford.
About the authors
Sophie Garrett is a Guildford resident of 20 years and a keen local historian, with a particular interest in the evolution of urban myth in the age of social media.
James Wright is an award-winning buildings archaeologist. He has two decades professional experience of ferreting around in people’s cellars, hunting through their attics and digging up their gardens. He hopes to find meaningful truths about how ordinary and extraordinary folk lived their lives in the mediaeval period.
He welcomes contact through Twitter or email.
The Mediaeval Mythbusting Blog blog is the basis of a forthcoming book – Historic Building Mythbusting – Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology which will be released via The History Press on 6 June 2024. More information can be found here:
