TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

This year, a visitor to the Well House at Crux Easton brought along an old sketch map of Well Meadow, drawn in 1974, showing the entrance to a tunnel.

The attraction of a tunnel is irresistible, like buried treasure. Our host, who owns the meadow, proposed an immediate search. He remembered crawling along tunnels as a child when it was all a rabbit warren. But now, with the rabbits gone, there was no trace of a tunnel anywhere.

The measurements given on the sketch were reassuringly precise. With a surveyors’ tape, a steel spike and a trowel, it didn’t take long to find the tunnel: an arched culvert, eighteen inches wide, built of brick and quite substantial. There’s little doubt it’s part of Edward Lisle’s missing mansion from the 1690s, home to the Lisle sisters, linked to Alexander Pope, and all the rest. But what its purpose was, and where it went, is anybody’s guess.

As he broke through into the tunnel, like Howard Carter breaking into the tomb of Tutankhamun, our host proposed half-jokingly that we might celebrate this as the inaugural meeting of the Crux Easton Archaeological Society. Agreement was unanimous.

So what next?

I wouldn’t care for Professor Alice Roberts and her JCB. That would spoil the meadow and the mystery although, with a name like Alice, she sounds just the right person to crawl down a burrow. We could ask her. But, without that bottle labelled ‘Drink Me,’ I don’t think she’d fit.

We need a slim local volunteer. We can send them along the tunnel and see where they come out – if they come out. If not, we can always tie a rope round their ankle and, like those Victorians with their chimney sweeps, drag them out feet first. Any skeletons will be some of Percy Bendle’s chums from Crux Easton School around 1910. In those days the children were intrepid tunnellers and rabbitters. An adventure underground is much better for you than today’s life glued to a mobile phone.

It reminds me of that other adventurous spirit from Crux Easton School, William Bevis. One day, walking home over the fields, he came across an aeroplane with Geoffrey De Havilland preparing for take-off. Geoffrey invited him up for a spin. William didn’t hesitate. He treasured the memory of that trip for the rest of his life.

Agricola, October 2025