The Peterborough Tunnels

A weird old story I came across in my bookmarks this morning tells a tale of tunnels under the town of Peterborough, England.

[Image: Gates in Holywell, Peterborough; photo by Rowland Hobson, courtesy of Peterborough Today].

The local newspaper, Peterborough Today, refers to a woman described simply as "a grandmother" who claims "that she crawled through a tunnel under Peterborough Cathedral as a schoolgirl." That experience—organized as a school trip, of all things—was "terrifying"; in fact, it was "so scary that it gave her nightmares for weeks afterwards."

About 25 of us went down into the tunnel, one at a time; none of the teachers came in. It was pitch black, had a stone floor and was about two feet high and three feet wide. We crawled along on our hands on knees. The girl in front of me stopped and started screaming, she was so scared. The tunnel started in the Cathedral and ended there too; we were down there for what seemed like ages. When I eventually got home I was in tears. Afterwards I had horrible nightmares for weeks about being buried alive underneath the Cathedral.

What's fascinating about the story, though, is the fact that not everyone even agrees that these tunnels exist. A "city historian" quoted in the same article says that, while "there are small tunnels under the Cathedral," they are most likely not tunnels at all, but simply "the ruins of foundations from earlier churches on the site, dating from Saxon times." The girls would thus have been crawling around amongst the foundations of ruined churches, lost buildings that long predated the cathedral above them.

But local legends insist that the tunnels—or, perhaps, just one very large tunnel—might, in fact, be real. To this end, an amateur archaeologist named Jay Beecher, who works in a local bank by day, has "been intrigued by the legend of the tunnel ever since he was a young boy when he was regaled with tales that had been passed down the generations of a mysterious passageway under the city." This "mysterious passageway under the city" would be nearly 800 years old, by his reckoning, and more than a mile in length. "Medieval monks may have used the tunnel as a safe route to visit a sacred spring at Holywell to bathe in its healing waters," we read.

Although Beecher has found indications of the tunnel on city maps, not everyone is convinced, claiming the whole thing is just "folklore." But it is oddly ubiquitous folklore. One former resident of town who contacted the newspaper "claimed that a series of tunnels ran between Peterborough and Thorney via a secret underground chapel." Another "said that he recalled seeing part of a tunnel in the cellar at a home in Norfolk Street, Peterborough," as if the tunnel flashes in and out of existence around town, from basement to basement, church cellar to pub storage room, more a portal or instance gate than an actual part of the built environment. And then, of course, there is the surreal childhood memory—or nightmare—recounted by the "grandmother" quoted above who once crawled beneath the town church with 25 of her schoolmates, worried that they'd all be buried alive in the center of town (surely the narrative premise of a childhood anxiety dream if there ever was one).

No word yet if Beecher has found his archaeological evidence, but the fact that this particular spatial feature makes an appearance in the dreams, memories, or confused geographic fantasies of the people who live there—as if their town can only be complete given this subterranean underside, a buried twin lost beneath churches—is in and of itself remarkable.

(If this interests you—or even if it doesn't—take a quick look at BLDGBLOG's tour through the tunnels and sand mines of Nottingham, or stop by this older post on the "undiscovered bedrooms of Manhattan").