28 May 2023
Header Image Credit: Ensum Brown
Secret passage tales are ubiquitous. This blog has covered several unfounded rumours already – including examples of the genre at Stone, Tintern, Guildford, and Burton-upon-Trent. There has also been an attempt to look at the underlying reasons for the continued popularity of hidden tunnel folklore.
There was a real flurry of online excitement when an apparently real secret passage was listed for sale in Fowlmere (Cambridgeshire) by the estate agents Ensum Brown in May 2023. Hill View Cottage was listed as including: “original period features, 2 reception rooms, 4 bedrooms over 2 floors, and a delightful enclosed garden.”
Hill View Cottage, Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire (Credit: Ensum Brown)
All pretty basic stuff, until the entry took a turn for the unexpected:
“There is also a door down to a basement area, with lots of space for storage, as well as a historic underground tunnel!
The Tunnel goes from Hill View Cottage and joins up with several historic properties in the village, with a small central meeting room. It was likely to have been built when Henry VIII created the church of England and was most likely used by Catholics and Protestants as an escape route when persons of authority visited, so as to avoid persecution. It is believed this could be the last remaining access to the tunnel, with others having been sealed off.”
There is even a photograph (see header image) and a Youtube video (hilariously soundtracked with The Jam’s 1980 number one hit single Going Underground) that has, at time of writing, been viewed over 9,700 times. This is no mere rumour, its allegedly the real deal! Or is it…
BBC Reporting
Well, the BBC certainly thought that it was real because, on 25 May 2023, they published an article about the 30 metre, L-shaped feature cut through the natural chalk under the headline: “Fowlmere: House over Reformation tunnel goes on the market” and incorporated a direct quotation from the estate agents’ listing.
Their investigative journalism knew no bounds as the anonymous journalist went on to note that there were “historical records” which proved that “the tunnel – which is 5ft 9in (1.75m) at its deepest and just 33in (0.8m) at its narrowest points – stretches under the road towards the war memorial, where it changes direction towards the Old Manor House on the other side of the High Street.”
Old Manor House, Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire (Credit: Mike Hallett / Historic England)
Finally, Auntie Beeb spoke to a local parish councillor – Deborah Roberts – who went on to explain that: “The house was once lived in by the parish curate of St Mary’s Church, but as things got difficult he would have needed a quick escape route.” She also noted that the local village pub, The Chequers, was connected to the labyrinth.
To sum up the claims by the BBC, Ensum Brown and Deborah Roberts:
- There is a chalk-cut tunnel which links Hill View Cottage and the Old Manor House in Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, as well as several other properties in the village including the Chequers.
- The tunnel is 30 metres long by 1.75 metres at its deepest and 0.8 metres at its shallowest.
- The tunnel was dug beneath the house of the parish curate, shortly after the English Reformation, so that both Catholics and Protestants could escape from Henry VIII’s persecutions.
Questions
There is absolutely no denying that this tunnel exists. However, can we be certain of its form, date, and function?
The first point to note is that we can probably discount rumours that other buildings are connected to this tunnel. Both the video and a plan of the feature, published in 1980, make it fairly clear that only Hill View Cottage and the Old Manor House are linked. Admittedly, there is a “blocked side-creep” (Pennick 1980) to the north-west of the Old Manor House entrance, but this is heading in the opposite direction to the Chequers (which is 107 metres to the north-east). There is no evidence to suggest where the blocked passage leads or how far it extends.
Plan of the Fowlmere tunnel (Credit: Pennick 1980)
Secondly, both the estate agents and the BBC make the claim that the tunnel dates to the sixteenth century and is in some way connected to Henry VIII’s Reformation. Somewhat oddly, it is alleged that both Catholics and Protestants used the tunnel – despite being on opposing sides in the religious turmoil. No physical evidence is supplied to underpin these claims.
The BBC hinted that: “Details with the property suggested the tunnel “was likely to have been built when Henry VIII created the Church of England…” However, no explicit reference is made as to what these “details” might be. Although, in the next paragraph there is a link to “historical records” – which takes the reader to an article entitled “The Underground Tunnel at Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire” by Nigel Pennick. This piece was published in the Journal of Geomancy vol. 4 no. 2 in January 1980.
The Journal of Geomancy was a short-lived publication which ran from 1976 until 1981. It was the brainchild of Nigel Pennick – who authored the Fowlmere article, edited, typed, and produced the journal, provided much of the copy and was the head of the Institute of Geomantic Research (IGR). According to their own publicity leaflet, the IGR encouraged research into: “landscape geometry; ley lines, terrestrial figures and zodiacs; feng shui and allied sciences; sacred geometry; cosmological town planning; earth energies and dowsing; astro-archaeology; ancient stones and the modelling of the landscape.”
The IGR was one man’s quest into the world of pseudo-science and pseudo-archaeology. We must be extremely cautious of basing any firm historical or archaeological conclusions on the work of a self-confessed geomancer given how widely discredited his field of research has been.
Reformation
However, if read very carefully, Pennick’s article does have some merit. First, it includes a reasonably accurate plan of the feature. Second, his research into the graffiti inscriptions determined that the tunnel had been accessible since at least the 1880s, and perhaps as far back into the eighteenth century. Third, that village folklore connected the tunnel to religious persecutions but, crucially, Pennick was sceptical of that.
Pennick critically cites the work of the local rector, Mr Yorke, who published an article on the tunnel in The History Teacher’s Miscellany for 1925. Yorke concocted a story, based on little or no evidence, that the tunnel was the creation of John Morden, rector of Fowlmere between 1610 and 1644. The latter was apparently removed from office on the orders of Oliver Cromwell and the tunnel was excavated so that he could access the Old Manor House to deliberate with, his patron and sympathiser, the local worthy Edward Aldred.
It is true that Morden was preferred as rector by Aldred and that he was removed from office in 1644 for his high church, Laudian, beliefs (Baggs Keeling and Meekings 1982, 155-64). However, Yorke made the assumption that the presence of the tunnel revealed where the renegade rector lived – Hill View Cottage. However, there is simply no archaeological or historic evidence to connect the tunnel or Hill View Cottage with Morden or the religious struggles that took place within the British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century.
The story, as presented by the estate agents and the BBC, is yet another interpretation which tracks back in time from the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century to the English Reformation of the 1530s and 40s. Yet again, though, there is no physical or documentary evidence presented which proves that the tunnel was constructed during this period. The “historical records” for the sixteenth century date, cited by the BBC, is Pennick’s article. Yet Pennick wrote only of Yorke’s seventeenth century story and was highly sceptical of any connection between the tunnel and the religious turbulence of the Early Modern period.
Strangely, Pennick did not offer up an explanation for the function of the tunnel. Instead, he was more concerned with the shape of the feature. The tunnel goes north-east from the Old Manor House before taking a sharp turn at a point directly under the Fowlmere war memorial and then heading south-east to Hill View Cottage. Pennick thought that the L-shaped deviation was a result of the presence of a ley line running east-west through the site of the war memorial. He speculated: “Could it be that the tunnellers had a dowser with them whose job it was to detect any such energy flows? Coming across a flow during the construction meant that a direction change had to be made so as not to disrupt the flow.”
We are far out into the reaches of pseudo-archaeology here.
Function
There is no direct evidence linking the tunnel to ley lines or the religious upheavals of the Early Modern period. However, rumours of secret passages used as escape routes for persecuted Catholics is a common trope in such folklore. During the post-mediaeval period Catholics were viewed with deep suspicion by the English establishment as the enemy within. Several Catholic conspiracies to undermine the state were unmasked and the perpetrators were tortured and executed mercilessly. The most famous of these seditious plots was, of course, the Powder Treason of 1605.
The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators, 1605 (Credit: National Portrait Gallery / Wikimedia Commons)
The notion that Catholics required secret passages to escape into or had tunnels dug so that they could covertly move between properties is so common. We may be seeing evidence for Protestant fears that those damned Catholics *must* be up to something! Such stories even persist to this day – as the example at Fowlmere demonstrates.
If the tunnel isn’t connected to fleeing Catholics, then what was it for?
The first clue is probably contained within the flint rich Upper Chalk (now more commonly referred to as the White Chalk by geologists) which is the underlying geology beneath Fowlmere. Industrial chalk extraction still takes place within Cambridgeshire, at Barrington and Steeple Morden, but was once more widespread and included historic quarrying at places such as Cherry Hinton, Great Chishill and Harlton. Extraction was often in the form of open-cast pits, but adits could also be driven into the ground as happened at Balsham.
Chalk adit at Balsham, Cambridgeshire (Credit: Bikin Glyn / 28dayslater.co.uk)
The form of the Fowlmere tunnel indicates that it was probably not cut in a single event. The tunnel is approximately 1.75 metres in height at its entrance but dips down to just 0.8 metres and then turns through a sharp angle of 60 degrees. The fact that the roof of the tunnel does not have a consistent height and is very low in its central section may indicate that it was not used for human traffic. The form of the tooling in the Fowlmere tunnel is remarkably like that at Balsham and we may be looking at two chalk adits, dug out from two adjacent properties, which unwittingly collided.
There were many reasons that landowners might have wished to dig chalk adits. First, in the context of a village settlement, land was at a premium so tunnelling was a convenient option. Second, open cast chalk pits took up a great deal of space which could not then be used for agriculture or building upon. Third, chalk was a valuable commodity which could be used for agricultural lime, road building, brick manufacture and walling. Equally, the flints found within the chalk also had varied uses including construction, gunpowder ignition and ceramic manufacture.
Put simply: the physical evidence seems to indicate that the Fowlmere tunnel was probably two chalk adits rather than a secret access for persecuted Catholics. The proposed reality may be less romantic, but this argument is based on archaeological observation rather than local folklore.
Conclusions
The natural chalk and flint geology of Fowlmere is an economic asset that was probably exploited by the historic occupants of the Old Manor House and Hill View Cottage. We cannot be certain when these colliding adits were dug, but dated graffiti inscriptions indicate that the tunnels were open from at least the 1880s and possibly from the eighteenth century.
Although there has been speculation, since at least 1925, that the tunnels were in some way connected to the persecution of Catholics, there is no clear proof that this was the case. The reasons for including such a romantic story in the property sales particulars is clear enough. Neil Wise, of Ensum Brown, noted that most properties “get around 60 clicks a day on Rightmove – this one received over 10,000 in a single day at the weekend“.
It is perhaps rather disheartening to see that the BBC reported hearsay as if it were historical fact without any attempt to critically evaluate the story. Yet, similar conclusions were also made, apparently without fact-checking, when the BBC covered the discovery of a “secret medieval tunnel” at Tintern, in 2021. This turned out to be a water conduit from the industrial manufacture of wire in the Angiddy valley (see Mediaeval Mythbusting Blog #5). Unfortunately, such credulous reporting of secret passage myths does media outlets no credit and only serves to muddy the waters of fact and fiction.
References
Baggs, A. P., Keeling, S. M. & Meekings, C. A. F., 1982, ‘Parishes: Fowlmere‘, in Wright, A. M. P. (ed.), A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 8. Victoria County History. London. pp155-164.
Pennick, N., 1980, ‘The Underground Tunnel at Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire’ in Pennick, N. (ed.) Journal of Geomancy Volume 4, Number 2. Institute of Geomantic Research. Cambridge.
About the author
James Wright (Triskele Heritage) is an award-winning buildings archaeologist who frequently writes and lectures on the subject of mediaeval building myths. 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:
