With a last minute postponement of this weekend’s scheduled drain adventure, I thought I’d use my spare time constructively to write up this one from a few weeks ago. So, one unexpectedly snowy, early December afternoon I dusted off my reindeer drawn sleigh and traveled afar to the distant land of Conisbrough to take a peek at the tunnel that runs for about 1km between there and Edlington.
The tunnel was constructed to carry a water pipe, somewhere in the late 1800s. It has four air vents visible from ground level and much of the pipe remains in place, except for the bits that have been nicked by the notorious Conisbrough pipe thieves.
Here are the pikachus I took with my picture box, roughly presented in order.
Entering at the Conisbrough end: disappear here...
The tunnel is a mixture of brick sections, and sections cut straight through the rock...
While you can easily walk through most of the tunnel, every time you reach one of the air portals there seems to have been attempt to fill in the tunnel, meaning it’s necessary to crawl through to the next sections. Thankfully there’s a few cave spiders hanging around to show you how... And whatever used to live down here seems to have survived on a diet of Fosters, judging from the amount of cans...
After an hour or so of taking pictures of a tunnel it was actually a nice surprise to have something else to point my camera at. Given that this wheelbarrow wouldn’t fit through the passage in this section due to the attempts to fill it I’m guessing this was either actually used to fill the tunnel, or thrown down the forth and final shaft at some point before it was covered. (I think this may be the most thought I have ever given to the location of a wheelbarrow...)
Nearly there, looking back where I came from...
And back on the sleigh...
