Old tunnel found near Tintern

[eastglosmog]

An old tunnel has been found in the Angiddy valley near Tintern Abbey - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56281726.  I suspect it is associated with the Tintern iron and wire works, so I doubt it is Medieval, though, see this paper by Parr and Tucker https://outsideecho.com/DGT-BIO_files/PDFs/DGT55.pdf

[enginelane]

Has it the fabled reserve steam engines in it?

[eastglosmog]

Only the ones for the Romney Hythe and Dimchurch line!

[woodenhead]

1 hour ago, enginelane said:

Has it the fabled reserve steam engines in it?

They pre-date trains, perhaps though there is a strategic reserve of horse and carts somewhere down the tunnel.

[Michael Hodgson]

The Wireworks Branch was built by and part of the Wye Valley Railway company. Although the GWR was the operating company from the outset, GWR locos were not allowed to enter the branch.

The wire & tinplate works had an 0-4-0 vertical boiler loco but this was sold when the works went out of business at the turn of the century, thereafter horse traction was used for traffic for the sawmills until the 1930s 

[Steamport Southport]

3 hours ago, enginelane said:

Has it the fabled reserve steam engines in it?

 

Don't believe everything you see on Tinternet....

 

 

[john new]

If it heads from upstream down to the abbey a perfectly logical clean water feed system to the abbey complex. The mediaeval monks were not stupid and many abbeys had complex water and latrine feed water (flushing) systems.

[Michael Hodgson]

I lived for in Llandogo, the next village up the Wye.  It still had the remains of the GWR halt which had closed in twenty years earlier, in 1959.

 

Tintern station was completely derelict and overgrown to the extent that it wasn't quite possible to walk the track bed to the site of Brockweir halt.  You couldn't go the other way because the river bridge (into England) had been removed.  This was a few years before the station building, goods yard and signalbox were restored by youngsters working under some job creation scheme, and the site turned into a picnic site.

 

On the opposite bank of the river it was still possible to walk through Tintern tunnel (bricked up but the steel doors weren't secured).  The Wye Valley line was still open a short distance further south to serve Tintern quarry, though the wireworks branch was long gone.   To get access to the tunnel you used the old wireworks branch bridge, which was still in general use as footbridge and still quite capable of taking light vehicles. 

 

The Anghidi "River" runs at right angles to the Wye and is very steep, but in reality it is only a very small stream unless there has been a lot of rain (but this side of the Wye is in Wales).  All the way up this valley are remains of much older industry and numerous industrial ruins, and the water course had been dammed to create artificial ponds all the way, the water no doubt extracted for various industrial uses and was unlikely to have been very clean by the time it reached the Wye.  I would be most surprised if this newly discovered structure was anything other than a channel for water.  I don't believe it would have been possible for the wireworks railway ever to have extended in the direction of Forge Road and the Anghidi much more than about a couple of hundred yards beyond the  A466 road simply because of the terrain.

 

 

Although we see Tintern today as a rural tourist spot, as did passengers in the late Victorian era who had excursion trains there, the area was still seen very much as an industrial zone when Wordsworth wrote his ode to Tintern Abbey

 

[tomparryharry]

A lot of 'secure buildings' have a protected water source, such as castles, etc.  Carisbrooke  Castle  has a narrow path down to the brook, as well as the donkey powered well.  

[Nearholmer]

On 06/03/2021 at 01:09, Michael Hodgson said:

I would be most surprised if this newly discovered structure was anything other than a channel for water.

 

Totally agree. I've explored that side-valley in fair detail a few times, and as soon as I saw that news report, I thought "water channel". Whether it is a water supply to the abbey, or a remnant of what were probably quite complex sluices and channels to water-wheels within the ironworks, I couldn't guess, but I bet the archaeologists will work that out.