History Under Foot

Dilemma: a rainy day in town but wanting to get some fresh air, what to do? Well shopping is all well and good but it can get expensive when my wife is let loose. So it was off for a nice walk under the canopy of some trees in Hargate Forest. I had an agenda though. If like me you have a copy of the wonderful 400 Years of the Wells, you might have read about Field Marshall Montomery's association with our town, and more specifically his almost mythical tunnels underneath the forest.

Field Marshall Montgomery had his Corps Headquarters at 10 Broadwater Down from 12th April to 17th November 1941 and it seems that the government, perhaps fearing a German land based invasion, had a network of tunnels excavated sixty feet below Hargate Forest on the south side of Broadwater Down from which Montgomery could possibly supervise troops.
Now of course all this is subject to interpretation as Montgomery himself in a letter to the Kent & Sussex Courier denies all knowledge of the underground HQ, perhaps this is true, but then again they were 500 yards from his base. The romantic inside me chooses to believe that they were his tunnels and we have a great part of military history under our feet.
There is little written about them, but several clandestine subterannean explorers have breached the brick and steel blockades and ventured down into the flooded chambers. From their reports and photographs the complex looks as if it wasn't completed, perhaps due to Montgomery moving away from the area in late 1941. The tunnellers describe the system as consisting of two parallel tunnels about 120 yards long, with eight rooms joining them like steps in a ladder. The rooms are about 5 yards long and are also completely flooded most of the year.
It was like being in a Famous Five adventure walking through the trees trying to locate one of the hidden entrances to the catacombs, but then the dark forboding entrance appeared through the trees and a chill ran down our spines, the scene looked like it had came straight out of the Blair Witch movie. My wife didn't want to hang around too long because a crow screeched loudly as I paused to take a photograph, did it know something?
It was an eerie feeling looking into the blackness of the hole in the brick wall, made more intimadating by the dampness of the wind and chill in the air so we called it a find and made our way back into the Forest to enjoy our walk again. Hargate is a nice diverse trek, from dense forest to open heathland and there are lots of flora and fauna to discover, even nightjars if you're brave enough to venture in at dusk. All in all it was a really pleasant walk in the damp autumnal air, we found mushrooms and fungi beneath almost every tree and small divots in amongst the pine needles where squirrels had been busy burying their winter stocks. A lovely walk with a mystery thrown in. Just goes to show, you never know what's under your feet...

More. If you are interested I've written some more articles on tunnels under The Wells here: Smugglers Tunnels and Caves Meet Tunnels.