The little workman unloosened the nut, and, with various groans and creaks, the door to the tunnel allowed itself to be pulled and shouldered open. Then, one by one, we stooped down and entered the tunnel through the small opening. When my eyes adjusted themselves from the light of day to the light of the Tilley lamps we had brought with us, I found that we were standing in a square-timbered heading perhaps six feet high and about the same in width. The floor, like the roof, was timbered, and from the roof, as well as from parts of the sides of the heading, a pale fungus growth drooped down. The atmosphere was pretty dank. Just inside the entrance, either hanging from big rough nails protruding from the wooden walls or lying to one side on the floor, there was a clutter of various objects—rusty chains, augers, lengths of decaying rope, candles, and a couple of lobster pots, the presence of which Adams explained to me. "They get washed up from time to time, and our lads, when they find them, put them in here for safekeeping," he said. Slowly we made our way into the tunnel. There was room for a set of narrow-gauge rail tracks, but most of the thin rails had been torn up, and a number of them lay piled to our right by the wall. On the left, untracked and abandoned, lay one of the rail trolleys that obviously had been used for hauling out spoil. The little rusted wheels on which it rested were of clearly Victorian design, with spokes elaborately arranged in curlicued fashion. "This is the access heading we're in," Adams told me as we found our way along, heads down. "The chalk carted out from the Beaumont boring machine was taken through here and dumped right into the sea outside the entrance. But this access heading wasn't the first to be built; it was dug by hand from the direction in which we're going, from the bottom of a vertical shaft sunk from the level of the South-Eastern Railway line seventy-four feet up above this concrete lining we're coming to now. As you see—" Adams took a Tilley lamp from Burgess and flashed it on the roof of the concrete lining—"the shaft has been closed up long ago. Now we'll go on. This first stretch is taking us in a northerly direction."
After going a short distance, we came to another concrete lining. This, Adams said, was to reinforce the tunnel at the point where it passed underneath the railway line. We went on again, this time walking on a dirt floor, and then we came to a timbered junction, from which the tunnel branched off again to the right in the north-east direction that was originally intended to bring it into line with the gallery at Shakespeare Cliff, while to the left there was a low-roofed chamber that probably once housed a siding and a maintenance workshop for the Beaumont boring machine. Then, walking now on half-rotted planks, in the warm light of the restlessly moving Tilley lamps, we entered the circular, unlined tunnel of Lower Chalk—a smooth, light-gray cavern, seven feet in diameter, that stretched far ahead to disappear into darkness. Our footing was slippery, and a small stream of water ran in the direction from which we had come in a rough gutter cut in the chalk, but the tunnel at this point seemed surprisingly dry for a hole that had lain unlined for some eighty years, and the stream of water draining away didn't seem to me to be really any greater than the one in the Orangeburg pipe that drains seepage from under the cellar of my summer house in Connecticut.
We had gone only a little way along the chalk tunnel when Adams, walking ahead of me, began flashing his light along the wall and then stopped and motioned me to come and look at the spot where he had focused his lamp. I did so and saw, cut into the chalk in crude lettering, the following inscription:
THIS
TUNNEL
WAS
BUGN
IN
1880
WILLIAM SHARP
However, this was not exactly how the inscription went, for its author, after finishing it, obviously had decided that "BUGN" didn't look right, and, being unable to erase the incision, he had had another go at it, inscribing the second try to one side and partly over the first, so that the intended "begun" now came out like "BEGUBNUGN." But with all the crudeness of the inscription, the author had been careful with the lettering, even to point of conscientiously incising serifs on the "T"s and "E"s.
While the light played about the inscription, I could see clearly, on the tunnel face, the ringlike marks left by individual revolutions of the cutting head of the Beaumont boring machine. After a few moments we moved on again, and eventually, after trudging over ground that became increasingly slippery, we came to a point where some of the chalk had given way, filling the tunnel about a quarter of the way up with debris. Adams said that the going got a bit better later on but that we were likely to find ourselves in water over our knee boots if we went any farther. At that point, impressed with the sight of all the fallen rock about and by the realization that we were in a seven-foot hole at least a quarter of a mile inside a huge cliff on a deserted stretch of coast, I felt as though I had seen enough. I suddenly realized what a smart idea Sir Edward Watkin had had in providing visitors with that champagne lift while they were well under the sea. So we turned back again and slowly, in silence, made our way out of Sir Edward's first tunnel.
When I stepped through the tunnel entrance into the light, it seemed very noisy outside. Sea gulls were shrieking overhead, and the Channel waves were roaring and heaving insistently. I had a slight headache, and I mentioned this to Adams. "Oh, yes, I have the same thing," he said. "Although the air in the tunnel is remarkably fresh, considering the length of time it's been locked up and the fact that there's only one entrance, there isn't quite as much oxygen in it as one might want." Jim began to lock up the entrance again, and while he was doing so, Adams suggested that we might see if we could spot the entrance shaft on the plateau above us. We climbed up the cliffside, and after a while we located it, a filled-in depression resting in a mass of bramble bushes. We waded through the bushes and stood over the remains of Number One shaft, still feeling a bit headachy. As we stood there, we picked and ate a few blackberries still left on the bushes from summer. "They're quite good," Adams said.
After we had had some lunch in Folkestone, Adams suggested that before I went back to London I might want to take a look at the site of the old Number Two shaft and the main tunnel at Shakespeare Cliff, even though the Number Two shaft and the Number Three ventilating shaft had been long ago closed up. I was agreeable to that, and Burgess drove us, by way of Dover, to a point along a back road, from which we could walk to the top of Shakespeare Cliff from the land side. While Burgess stayed in the little car, Adams and I set off up a long slope to the cliff head, walking along the edge of a harrowed field, the soil of which seemed to be riddled with the kind of large flints typical of the Upper Chalk layer.
On the way up, Adams told me what had happened to the main tunnel and shaft after the workings were finally stopped by the Board of Trade. "Everything stopped dead at the tunnel workings until 1892," Adams said. "By then, Sir Edward Watkin knew he was beaten on the Channel tunnel, so he tried a different kind of tunneling, and the South-Eastern Railway engineers began boring for coal a matter of a few yards away from the tunnel shaft. They went down to 2,222 feet with their boring, at which level they met a four-foot seam of good-quality coal, and the company obtained authority by an act of Parliament to mine for coal under the foreshore. As for the Channel-tunnel shaft itself, it was abandoned in 1902 and filled up with breeze—ashes and slag—from the colliery, and the Number Three ventilation shaft at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff was also filled with breeze in the same year. But the colliery never paid off any better than the tunnel project. It ran into trouble around 1907 or 1908, and then the owners decided they'd have a try at getting iron ore out of the workings, and so all the mineral mining rights were bought by the Channel Steel Company, but the iron mining didn't prosper any more than the coal mining. The Channel Steel Company went into voluntary liquidation in 1952, and all the mining rights passed to the original freeholders, who are now the British Government."
Adams and I climbed over a wooden fence stile, and after a couple of more minutes of uphill walking we arrived at the top of Shakespeare Cliff. We approached to a point near the edge and kneeled in the tall grass, buffeted by a strong afternoon wind that struck us squarely in the face. It was a magnificent view. The Channel lay very far below us, and although I could not see the coast of France because of the haze—Adams said that on a fine day anybody could see clearly the clock tower outside Boulogne—I could see shipping scudding along in whitecaps in the middle of the Strait. To the left of us, not far away, lay the Admiralty Pier at Dover, the one that once had the great gun which the Illustrated London News had imaginatively depicted in the act of blowing the tunnel entrance to pieces at the first sign of a French invasion of England through the tunnel.