good morning everybody welcome to another video welcome to
our blissworth tunnel video now we're not just making a video about a canal
tunnel
that there is incredibly dangerous
we brought along matt, matt has pointed out that blisworth holds a bit of a
secret now if i just bring the camera over
there and show you just up there
there is a small shaft now that shaft there and that
holds the key to the mystery of this video and why we're going to look
in particular at three different bliss worth tunnels
join us at the southern portal where we start our journey and explain a little
bit more
so blisworth canal tunnel many people know it for
the beautiful canal tunnel uh double double beamed is that why i call it that
double double it's a wide beam but not
many people know that um it was built twice or it was certainly
attempted to be built twice before the current alignment so we found
a really interesting website we matt found a
really interesting website where this guy tried to articulate all
the different features that have been found
as evidence for two different routes i've no idea what that's called map but
we'll put it in the link below right so as we suggested there
matt found a website with a fascinating study done by tony marsh
back in 2007 and the years leading up to that
i'll put a link in the description below to this wonderful website and study that
he did so what exactly did tony marsh do so
tony marsh surveyed the whole this area and he did
so with permission from the local landowners so here we have
the final alignment of the tunnel that's still in use today
now tony marsh went out and he tried to find every little bit
of a feature that was associated with a building of a canal so
sunken areas where there were previous shaft attempts different shafts that
were built and he he went along and he labeled all
these different areas um and he labeled all the different
features here's one there's another um and
every different feature he decided he would give a label
and say right there is a whole bunch of features
that kind of looks like a line exactly and that exactly what that is
so he made two more lines using all the features he found i'll try
and get this as straight as i can
i found that through all these different features there was a straight line
not only was there one straight line there was two straight lines because
there was also
another straight line there with a couple of features along it and he
decided and he came to the conclusion that actually this tunnel here that is
still in existence and used today was quite possibly the third attempt at
a tunnel for blisworth and there were two more attempts because
of all the features he found and he thought there's one and there's
another okay well let's get back to our video
and see what we found
right so the first part of this journey is the southern part and we're looking
for the portal which would have been the
portal for possibly two other roots green root and purple root i
want to say green and purple so the green and purple
alignment could have been somewhere in the field just over here
i'm just saying it says you're here number one yeah
and then number three just here is approximate site to first tunnel
excavation that's quite a way to the right though
which is just through the
signpost clearly says tunnel excavation over here
so not where we thought it was which was immediately back there
and as the sign says abandoned on two different occasions because
of collapses and i think the first occasion killed 14 men
so perhaps they were digging a headway i wonder
if it's there
yeah so if you can see on camera
there
quite a heavy indentation in the land and it looks quite undulating there so i
wonder if that there was the site of the first
portal so we're at the southern portal now of blisworth tunnel
there is you can hear the faint sound of an engine coming through it
no unpowered craft to go through i don't even go through it in a
wide beam because how would you do that you did like a token or something when
you're basically
right so in 1980 they had to do a lot of repairs on the
inside section of the tunnel and that there was what they used which was a
precursor to the channel tunnel and it was used as an experiment in this
tunnel to determine um if that would work so basically
concrete blocks um and clearly that's as strong as as you
can imagine and obviously therefore they did design
or use that design on the channel tunnel well that's completely true or not but
that is the story that's um we're told and led
to believe
so i didn't know if this was the tramway or not
um but clearly now we found that there i recognize that from the interweb
as being part of the original tramway the outcome built
so Benjamin outram was hired to build a railway over the canal
while it was being built because the grand union canal was built first
and the last thing to be built upon it was the canal itself
so they needed a means so they could use it for the next 10 years because who
know how long it was going to tip they needed a means to get the goods
from one end to the other and that was obviously railway
benjamin outrun said at the time i actually think the future
is the railway anyway down there is the culvert that was used for the railway
believe it or not he also built a double tracked railway along here
so it literally had two um l-shaped um plates as the the the carts would be
pulled by the horses so they could go either way without
having to use any kind of point system right we're looking for a sunken feature
now the biggest issue we've got is
it's the summer and there's a lot of greenery about
but we're looking for a sunken feature in the land which would have marked
i think the green root now the sunken feature would obviously indicate a shaft
and therefore give evidence to the uh eastern route it's really difficult to
see from the guys picture that we're looking
at so originally this fell down 10 feet farmer filled it in and
apparently when the guy wrote that article
it was uh falling down again another three feet
right that is almost certainly it down there if you can see
there so i don't want to get too close but that is almost certainly a big hole
a small area at the edge of a field that has been fenced off by a farmer it
has sunk in the past interestingly this feature was rediscovered in a recent
survey noting that t.w milner regional chief
engineer of the g uh the grand grand gj canal
grand junction grand james good to go found a sunken feature in 1922 and gave
in a letter its coordinates here
from the southern portal off line to the east
perpendicular by 200 feet so through the trees the other side of this caravan
park is another proper shaft now that's a
proper shaft for the actual canal here is the 200 feet this way offline to
the east it is probably that now no one until now
has made use of milner's net letter well we can't see
anything we're looking kind of here and wondering if that's a an
embankment bit around it um we're at the right location we're
sure because it's been fenced off but there's nothing obvious
no undulation that we can see it's probably too summery probably too much
vegetation
so as with sapperton by the roadside you see all these um little cops there's
little bits of wood up on mounds clearly as we'll see here
they're all shaft points um right there you can see what's almost certainly
going to be the excavation for the shaft it's kind of how scary is that to know
that this isn't fenced off this is right next to the road here um
we know what we're kind of looking for um but anyone else maybe that would uh
sort of i don't know walk off path perhaps that
there incredibly dangerous um presumably it
was just a construction shaft never ever been used as an air vent
um yeah very dangerous
right so this is our last point before we're gonna head to the northern portal
that's the um canal uh shaft on both of the routes which is root uh the
actual route of the canal so that serves it now but there's also
the misaligned purple route so the purple route would have gone from
um the western side on the southern portal
to the eastern side of the northern portal
and they both crossed here so that was potentially used as well
as a line of sight hence was about 30 feet in the air
so the guy that wrote the website said he comes back here every year
expecting to find the portal
we're on the green alignment we're replicating the picture that the guy on
the website took of this this plateau here so this
plateau and that there is as he described
that there is a one foot depression and is more than likely a shaft that has
appeared so again you don't necessarily want to
stand on top of it if i come around here but what we need to be doing is almost
drawing a line straight line south there to the
original portal that we're at aligned here
into that construction shaft there straight down towards the canal so we
need to head in a straight line down there with the canal dog legs
and heads off back north to see if we can find a
northern portal um i'd completely forgotten about the
railway until matt inadvertently stood on an old um
pinned masonry block for the um the l-shaped plateways so around this side
of the canal we're past the northern portion around
this side of the canal down here off down to where rebecca is obviously
was out ram's um old tramway right so we reckon
somewhere down here maybe in the hedge there maybe
down here would have been um the first
uh headway at least the headway whether it was actual board out proper tunnel
but certainly a headway into here where highly likely 14 people died and
were crushed under here but that's obviously
scaled already so i probably spent the best part of
half an hour here scrambling in the embankment in these prickly hedges
looking for the portal tony marsh apparently comes here once a year hoping
that one day the portal will show its face
there is no reason to believe this alignment is incorrect
the shaft that we found here at point c in the middle of the video very much
aligns itself with the green root not the actual main tunnel
despite this it is actually used for the main tunnel despite being 40 feet
off a line and therefore has an incredibly wonky shaft
so back at the northern portal scrambling around in the undergrowth we
sadly found nothing maybe tony will one day get his wish
so um we're pretty sure this exactly right behind me now is the alignment of
the canal going north we're almost sure the heading the portal
should be in there and we can't see anything which is a
real shame because we had hoped we might see
something it's very wet underfoot there but we're thinking in there
is under there somewhere maybe the original heading completely filled in
now
so we kind of knew we weren't going to have a great deal of luck with the
portals themselves we thought we would have more luck with
the um sunken features and we did we found quite a few of those which do
account for at least two other original alignments we're no further to
guess in how far they've got there's sadly no documented evidence
other than i think even the parliamentary approval just said
yes you can build a tunnel rather than detailing the exact route
which is why they could get away with changing it a few times so from
high above the northern portal of blissworth tunnel
from the possible site of the uh original northern portal we bid you
farewell uh from north hamptonshire and we shall
see you next week thanks for matt for his guidance along the route
and we will um see you next week peeps
and we're also in northamptonshire you know what that means
rebecca i'm not i'm not doing it yeah i've not done it
cobblers