Explanation

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 31st August, 2006 @ 01:47

Following on from my last post which ended up being just a couple of pictures of what I got up to last week I suspect I owe you an explanation for what I was up to!

My good friends Dave & Neil recently moved back to Bedford, not too far down the road from my place. Neil apparently has a little obsession about abandoned train tunnels and knew of a tunnel not far from here, near the village of Old Warden. A search on Google Earth revealed what appeared to be the north portal of the tunnel, along with a fairly clear route to walk to it. So off we went to investigate. You can read all about our 3 trips to the tunnel, along with a brief trip to St Marys Church, Clophill over here on Neil's new urbex section.

I mentioned the tunnel walk to Richard, who got very excited at the prospect and rather jealous that while I was exploring supposedly blocked-off Victorian railway tunnels, he was stuck writing a report for a client. Neil then mentioned a tunnel deep in the Northamptonshire countryside near the villages of Catesby and Charwelton, this time 2 miles long as opposed to the half mile journey through the Old Warden Tunnel.

The mere mention of this got Richard so excited that he jumped on the first train to Bedford (this being a Thursday evening) so we could go and explore the tunnel the next day. What I didn't count on was Richard's suggestion at 11.30pm or so that we go and visit Old Warden Tunnel that night. A trip to Tesco later and we were armed with torches and set off for the path to the tunnel. You can find Richard's account and pictures here.

Unfortunately Dave & Neil were unable to join us on the trip to Catesby Tunnel the next day, so we set off with a quick stop in at Tesco so Richard could upgrade the cheapy torch he'd purchased the previous evening with a more expensive superbright LED model that I'd previously bought. If you explore tunnels, it's a good idea if you each go armed with a half-decent torch! From there, to Matalan to purchase some wellies, previous visitors accounts we'd found online indicated it might be a good idea. £6 each later and we were good to go.

Despite heavy traffic getting in the way whichever diversion I tried to make, we eventually got to the small parking area next to the railway bridge and headed off down the bridleway to the tunnel's South Portal.

You can find Richard's short summary and pictures here. All I'll add is that I'm glad we had decent torches. Every hundred yards or so there was a large drainage hole that it wouldn't have been fun to fall into!

Why blog when you can drag others along with you and get them to blog it? :)