Journal of Geomancy vol. 4 no. 2, January 1980
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On September 1st 1979, in connexion with the Cambridgeshire Ley Project, a party of project members and Ley Hunter staff visited a unique Cambridgeshire tunnel. The tunnel is unique for several reasons. It is one of the very few known tunnels which links buildings on either side of a road – there are many legendary tunnels, but this one exists. No other ancient tunnels have yet been discovered in the county, and this one has a strange deviation at its centre, the geomantic significance of which is discussed below.
The tunnel leads from the cellar of the Old Manor House, Fowlmere, beneath the B1368 road, deviating at the War Memorial, from whence it emerges in a cellar of Hill View Cottages. The Old Manor House is believed to have been built during the sixteenth century, and comprised three dwellings rented by tenants from the Lord of the Manor. The most northern of these three buildings, which are now converted into a single dwelling, has a cellar. In the brick wall of the cellar is a door which gives direct access to the tunnel. At its entrance the tunnel is 5 feet 9 inches in height, but this rapidly declines into a creep 33 inches high as it reaches the road. At this point there is the remains of a side creep which has at some time been filled in. The exit once opened into the yard to the north of the buildings, and may have been the original access for the workmen who built the tunnel, as removing chalk into the cellar would have been a difficult business.
Twenty seven feet along the passage from the side creep are post holes and two niches opposite one another. These are cut into the chalk walls of the tunnel and provide seats 9 inches from the floor, and a sitting height of just over 40 inches. Ten feet further along the tunnel there is a deviation of about 60 degrees. At this point there is brickwork overhead, but this was not contemporary with the tunnel. It is the footing of the Fowlmere War Memorial, erected after the Great War of 1914–18. The tunnel was broken into during construction of the memorial, and, unlike many other tunnels (e.g. Glastonbury and Borley), it was not blocked with rubble but bricked over for further use, as it carried power cables. The insulators of these cables, now devoid of wire, may still be seen on brackets along the northerly side of the passage. Pencilled graffiti, of which there are many, record various visits during the last century, and the names of the workers who installed electricity in 1922. It must have been difficult working in such cramped conditions, and the graffito reads as following:
J. HILL AND W. HAYNES LAID THESE WIRES AUGUST 2ND 1922 and oh what a job R.I.P.
Various other persons over the years have left their mark. Here is a selection collected by Nigel Pennick, John Cann, Paul and Solomon Devereux:
EW 1906 AMB 1889 G.W. BANNISTER 1910 MAY 5 1916 H ISON 1891 P T QUARRY Aug 18/04 MILLS HN J BARYLOW SCOTT Jan 12 1957 W. KERSHAW ADE J Oct 2nd ‘89’ 24th 1922 H.PULL 106 REGENT ST CAMBRIDGE A DEAMISH ESQ CHRISTABEL BRIGGS OCT 1955 J. BOWER 31.8 {18} J & S C KENZIE 1897 June 28 Jim Marshall 30/9/53 GRAHAM WILSON 27/10/09 E.C. BARNES 1933 Started at Jacksons F. HILL A. NILLERD Sept 19 1903 W. JACKSON Aug 15th 1891 J. HILL PUT LIGHT MAINS IN AUG 2 19__ AE 1926 A. Moult 1916 W. HAYNES ELECTRIC MAINS AUGUST 2nd 1922 RIP
It can be seen that the tunnel has been visited regularly since the 1880s by people who considered it worthwhile to record their names there. Several initials in a more antique <style>, possibly 18th century, are carved in the walls of the eastern side of the tunnel. In this section there are also niches, presumably made to hold candles for illumination. Towards the end of the tunnel, it narrows considerably and becomes a low creep. It emerges via a couple of steps into the cellar of the northerly of the two Hill View Cottages, though at the time of the visit the owner pretended to be out and we had to retrace our crawl.
The purpose of the tunnel is enigmatic. To construct a tunnel over 100 feet in length and big enough for a standing walk for much of its length required the removal of a large amount of chalk, not an undertaking to be made in secret. The creep at the Old Manor House end must have been used for the removal of the spoil, but there are no wheelbarrow marks in the tunnel itself. It has been suggested, in the conventional view of such matters, that the tunnel was used by a renegade priest during one of the recurrent religious persecutions which have punctuated the history of these islands. The effort involved in constructing this tunnel must belie such a story. A lame attempt to account for priestly involvement appeared in an obscure publication called The History Teachers’ Miscellany in June 1925. Apparently, the author Mr Yorke, had researched into the rectorship of John Morden, who was rector from 1610 until 1644, when he was removed under the Cromwellian administration. Yorke himself was rector, and died in 1932.
Yorke wrote: “There can be little hesitation in fixing the site of his residence. It is exactly opposite the ‘Lordship’, the Old Manor Farm House at the top of the village. In that Lordship, Mr Edward Aldred the second was living his last years at Fowlmere as tenant of Mr La Mott the new lord of the manor; perhaps the only churchman in the place. The farm that Mr Morden had rented ever since his first arrival, and which he continued until his deprivation, was probably the farm which he bought. As a yeoman holding, it would have its homestead premises. The house suggested, now divided, until two years ago (1923 – N.P.) had its farmyard perquisites at the back and side. The thing which justifies this identification is the curious underground tunnel from its cellar to the cellar of the ‘Lordship’. Cut In the solid chalk, just big enough for passage in a single file, shaped like the figure 7 with two seats excavated in the short arm, an evident bolthole at the crossing leading out to the Lordship rickyard, and another unfinished leading out to the abolished ‘Swan Inn’, there is nothing in the village story to account for it save Mr Morden’s translation from Rectory to farm.”
This is a circular argument, determining the unknown site of the rector’s habitation from the mysterious tunnel. The ‘bolt hole’ parallels the ‘creeps’ of Cornish fogous, strange ritual underground passages whose precise purpose is not yet determined, and is probably not a bolt-hole, being too close to the other entrance for safety.
{19 Plan of tunnel}
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Several features of the tunnel make it unusual. The deviation at the centre of the road (later chosen for the site of
the War Memorial) is unusual to say the least. There are traces of the tunnel having been continued in a straight line
from the Old Manor House at that point, but abandoned. We wondered whether there was any geomantic reason for this. In
Paul Devereux and Ian Thomson’s book The Ley Hunter’s Companion, ley E2, the Westley
Waterless ley, is traced to run from an earthwork and moat at Westley Waterless for 15½ miles to Fowlmere. The
points on the ley are moat – St Mary’s Westley Waterless – Fleam Dike narrow point –
St Peter’s Babraham – Whittlesford churchyard – site of tumulus – St George’s
Thriplow – St Mary’s Fowlmere. Beyond St Mary’s there is nothing of antiquity. However, the ley
crosses the place where they put up the War Memorial in the 1920s – a three-way road junction which just happens
to be burrowed through by a tunnel. Looking at the map, we saw that the tunnel turns as if to avoid the ley. An
inexplicable deviation explained?
Various workers in the field of dowsing have come up with various manifestations of energy channeled through leys. Certain lines have shown to be detectable by their energy-pattern, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that dowsers in the past, who were more numerous than today, knew of this phenomenon. 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.
This is not so unlikely as it may at first appear. In the ancient Chinese Shih Chi it is recounted that when the Great Wall of China was built there was considerable worry that its geomantic effect would be disastrous. The architect Meng Thien, who was in charge of its construction, was ordered to commit suicide for having ‘cut through the veins of the earth’, and thus rendered irreparable damage to her. His reply to the envoy bringing to order of suicide from the eunuch Chao Kao, successor to Emperor Chhin Shih Huang Ti, was as follows:
“Indeed I have a crime for which I merit death. Beginning at Linthao, and extending to Liao-tung, I made ramparts and ditches over more than 10,000 li, and in that distance it is impossible that I did not cut through the veins of the earth. This is my crime”.
He then swallowed poisons. The year was 209 BCE. Apart from being one of the earliest literary references to the practices of geomancy, this passage recounts one of the fundamental doctrines – that of leaving the ‘veins of the earth’, or energy channels, uncut. The construction of a tunnel beneath the ground would certainly cut a flow which, if not actually in the earth, was detectable by dowsing as in the earth. Thus the mysterious deviation at Fowlmere to avoid an attested ley.
Finally, there is another corollary of this strange instance. The War Memorial itself. Why should the seemingly-secular commission which decided on memorials to the War to end Wars (sic) or the Great War for Civilisation (as it said on the medals) decide on a site directly on a ley? Masonic influence – or the use of dowsers – or the gleaning of local information for special sites? We do not know. All we have to go on is the work of researchers like Colin Bloy who have found that such important things as War Memorials tend to stand on ‘telluric lines’. This line is certainly not generated by the War Memorial, being an ancient ley. Tunnels are so few and far between that we have little date to go on, so we must draw conclusions from the few examples we have. Fowlmere certainly is a challenge to theorists, if nothing else!