Underground Kent: The Hidden Heritage of Kent

Description: The Kent Archaeological Society host a talk by KAS Vice President, Trustee and Kent Underground Research Group Chair Rod LeGear on Kent's underground assets. Rod explains what it takes to investigate these enigmatic and sometimes perilous historic assets, common misunderstandings about their uses and the sheer variety of caverns, dene holes, drainage ditches and bunkers that have been dug into the County of Kent for many, many generations. From Prehistoric mines to WWII defensive positions to the more obscure or downright odd, This fascinating look into human intervention into the landscape can tell us so much about the economy, ingenuity and resourcefulness of our forebears.

Transcript: [Music] good evening everyone thanks very much for attending this the live recording of our trustee talks for the kent archaeological society and of course for those of you watching the recording thanks for you too attending this event and taking interest in our work the kent archaeological society exists to promote the understanding of the history and archaeology of the ancient county of kent and you can find out more about our work on our website and for those who are not members it would be very good for you to consider joining and supporting our work we've been in existence now since 1857 and so we have a long and distinguished history and we hope to continue um this evening we are really really privileged to have one of our longest serving members rod laguire rodriguez has been a member of the kent archaeological society uh since i believe 1963 or 1964. rod is a retired engineer although he started his working life in the ordnance survey where he attained a good grounding in surveying and cartographic draftsmanship and his interest in archaeology started when as a school boy he explored the many dean halls near peck city with his friends and a length as he says of dubious rope two like local archaeologists and kent archaeological society members the late john and esther kager took him under their wing and he was invited to help them on several medieval excavations in northwest kent as well in assist as well as assisting john to record many underground sites and that's as a result of that while he joined the kent archaeological society he has in fact served on the council since 1983 and then again in 2013 he was elected a vice president and he's a member of the industrial archaeology committee until recently uh has been a member of the field work committee and that was since 1985. he is also a member of the chartered institute for archaeologists he's a chairman of the affiliated society the ken underground research group which he founded in 1982 to promote the recording of underground heritage in the um county so there are a few impact probably no one better qualified to speak about the subject that rod will be speaking about tonight underground kent kent's hidden heritage be very good for those who do watch this on our youtube channel to like and give us the thumbs up and also to leave any comments there now i pass over to roddler gear to talk about underground kent kent's hidden heritage and there's an opportunity to ask questions in the question box and i'll ask those at the end to rod and hopefully he'll be able to give you answers thank you very much rod Underground Kent good evening uh man has actually dug under kent for generations and generations and they've left lots of underground space for us to discover now now some of these cavities left are quite big the one on the left is a chalk mine at some peters and they're broad stairs the small one is a small drainage channel known as frank inningworth's tunnel at peggwell bay often called a smuggler's tunnel in fact was a drainage tunnel for a cottage now long demolished up on the cliff now the trouble with uh going underground is you've got to be very careful and we have to be very careful with health and safety and the ken underground research group has got quite a thick investigation procedures and safety protocols you can't just dash underground with a candle and an old bicycle helmet or something you have to take a lot of care Hazards because there are a lot of hazards there you see a shaft going up and down a shaft you've got the danger of possibly falling off the ladder so you have to be specially roped up also the bottom of the shaft is quite a dangerous area because if any falls down the shaft it accelerates as it comes down and can do you serious harm and this photograph is taking down an excavation we were doing in a well at the bottom you can see a wooden platform the excavator when sending stuff up in the bucket goes underneath that platform to avoid anything falling down also in that particular case we had to pump in fresh air all the time because old wells especially those dug in chalk often fill up with carbon dioxide so therefore it's hazardous to us so we have to pump the air out and also we have to go through some tight tunnels this one is a an old building stone mine near westrom i was a lot younger then i actually had dark hair also some of the tunnels we go through are a bit um unsafe so we have to have the skills to decide what is too unsafe and what we can go through careful Extraction first we'll talk about extraction there are two reasons for digging holes in the ground one is you want to get something out the ground and the other is you want the underground space so we look at extraction first one of the first things that man ever dug out of the ground was water for worlds in kent there are thousands of wells because before the coming of maine's water you had to get your water either from a river or a well most of these wells now are all capped over and long forgotten but occasionally they make their presence known again this one opened up in the middle of a school playing field on thanet this is the members of the kent underground research group going down the shaft and there is the subsidence and that's looking down the shaft rather unusual shape normally wells of course are around this one was associated with a brickfield tonight long gone now of course but uh there's probably two or three others on that area as well because brickfield's used tremendous amount of water but the other thing that was dug from kent in vast quantities was chalk um we often think of chalk as being extracted from huge open quarries like this one this particular one i hate with a passion because that became blue water shopping center i must admit shopping is not my main interest but ancient man took chalk out in a different way things called dean holes or chalk wells Dean Holes it was the victorians that first came up with the name dean holes for these small vertically shafted chalk mines in fact the very first um issue of our closure cantiana in 1858 contains an article on the discovery of of ancient british romano british and roman pottery found in a chalk cavern in camden park shazlist that small cavern those times were called caverns or pits but later on in victorian times they were started become dean holes Pictures of Dean Holes this is some pictures of dean hall shafts the little sketch is a victorian sketch of someone hanging on for dear life looking down a shaft on the right is a typical medieval deenhole shaft a row of footholds going down the sides and the sketch on the left shows how the miner went up and down the shaft the victorians thought that those holes were meant to put a log across them so you could climb up and down the shaft with a ladder but considering that shaft is only about a meter wide um you'd have to be very slim to climb up it no they were simply holes and footholds so the miner could climb in and out easily the first ever sketch of the dean hall was made around 1610 for william camden's britannia and it shows quite well really shafts going down and opening out into a set of little chambers at the bottom they were dug to get chalk out for agriculture because an application of crushed chalk on an acidic soil such as planet sand would sweeten the soil as they called it combat the acid and the crops would grow better now the victorians were terribly terribly interested in them there's a picture of the sid cup literary and scientific society in 1895 going down a deen hole the other one is some gentleman looking at a deen hole at a field somewhere in essex now all the time they were looking at these deen holes and wondering what they were they were coming up with some wonderful theories such as animal pets grain stores but actually no they just dug for chalk and in fact while they were arguing in their meetings deed holes were still being dug and they were still being dug in northern france in the 1930s there's a chat with a windlass drawing up the buckets of chalk and then someone spreading them on the land in little heaps which somebody else would come along break up with a sledgehammer then the winter frost would break it up further and the chalk would be plowed in in the following spring a local antiquarian to bexley called uh flaxman john spurrell was terribly interested in dean halls and he set about investigating them he wrote two quite good papers on them although his conclusions were rather strange but this is a plan of joydance woods bexley made by him in the 1880s he was assisted by a young friend of his a chap called flinders petri who shortly after went off to egypt to make a name for himself as an egyptologist now that plan shows the wood and if you can see my marker that is the saxon boundary between bexley and dartford all the other lines are medieval field banks this little square which used to be shown on alternate survey plans it's a roman camp is actually the deserted medieval village of occult owned by lesnar's abbey but every little dot on that plan shows a deanhold shaft and most of them followed the lines of the field boundaries except these two massive groups there's far too much chalk came out of there to be used just for agriculture they were used probably for building as well the chalk coming out of the kv springs group on the left probably went to bexley village which is only about half a mile away to the northwest it was used for foundations of buildings quite a few medieval buildings have got footings of chalk in bexley also two or three wells were lined with chalk blocks the group to the right at stanky wood the chalk from there probably went to the building of the baldwin's estate which is again about half a mile to the east that's the sketch of one of the deen holes in the stanky wood area the photograph shows somebody down them because that particular deen hole was still open in the 1960s and that trap there holding the the pressure lamp the tinny lamp was the late john cager who did a lot of work on surveying recording bean holes the other figure to the side of the pillar is me aged about 14. i started young these are typical deen hole chambers the top one shows a bench at the back which some victorians thought were druids altars they're not they just simply platforms the miner would stand on to carry on uh cutting the chalk forward now one thing about most dean holes is the chambers are very short because nobody had got any underground transport down there the chalk was cut out from the working phase put into a basket attached to a rope and it would be hauled up to the surface directly from the working face so as the moved forward the friction at the base of the shaft by the hauling rope would get tighter and tighter until it got so tight they couldn't haul up the chalk anymore at that point the dean hole was abandoned so all the talks of uh tunnels going for miles and miles from the dean hall shaft are unfounded they only go so about 10 15 meters the one on the right is a later version of a dean hall called chalk well in these uh a wheelbarrow is used this is probably 17th century this one um wheelbarrows didn't start to be used in vertically accessed chalk lines in kent to around about the 14th century but that uh one on the right is on the lee's quarter state um beautiful condition and one of the few that are still it's still accessible now when they finish mining the chalk and spreading on the land they really didn't want an open hole interfere with ploughing so the traditional way of stopping one up was to throw a bush or tree stump down there then backfill it with all the material you dug out the shaft around grey's end area for some reason they put in walls at the bottom of the shaft and in the later versions the cork wells from 17th century onwards they often put a brick or flint cap now that's all very well but sooner or later bush or tree stump will rot away and then you have a column of compacted earth standing on absolutely nothing and sooner or later it will collapse bringing the dean hole to life again these two are in the field but unfortunately they don't always turn up in fields because many of the old medieval farms are now built on sometimes they turn up in in back gardens as well as chalk for the land the chalk was also burnt for lime for Chiselhurst making lime mortar and lime wash some of the mines got quite extensive this one is at chiselhurst not the famous chiselers caves but about half a mile north of them it's much more extensive than the dean hall underground transport such as barrows were used and a form of mining known as pillar and stall where tunnels were dug and other tunnels dunk at right angles leaving large square pillars to support the roof this one was dug for the line burning and also gave quite a bit of the chalk from this particular mine went to making new railway embankments at chiselers that's one of the galleries of the mine the two members of the kent underground research group doing a graffiti survey recording graffiti nowadays is quite important one time it was just dismissed but of course it brings up the question how much of the graffiti do you record do you just recall the old stuff overall the modern stuff such as kilroy was here or manchester united rules okay and all the rude stuff we've taken a view that record absolutely everything chalk was also used for brick making and that little inset photograph shows Chalk some yellow stock bricks now they're either called kent stock bricks or london stock bricks depending where you are sort of west of dartford they tend to be the london bricks and east and bricks now it was chalk which gave those bricks their color between about seven and ten percent chalk was added to the clay to make the bricks and they became very prominent in victorian times when the coming of the railways towns were expanding and a lot more building was taking place and millions of bricks were needed so virtually anywhere a small bit of clay could be exposed and burnt for bricks once done so and hundreds of little brick fields sprang up but of course they wanted chalk to add to the mix and they wouldn't want to pay to bring it far from a quarry so almost all of them had chalk mines dug under the brickfield this one at shepherd's lane dartford owned by a chap called kid owned a large brewery in the town it's quite extensive pillar and store mining again operating from about 1850 to about 1910. it was sealed up forgotten and then in the 1980s the dartford borough council decided they wanted to get rid of a bit of surplus land which was just a scrub had a i think a scout's hut on it they started doing the paperwork searches and they discovered to their horror mention of a chalk mine on the site so they started to look for it they got a jcb on site and what they uncovered was this well shaft so then they wondered if the well shaft actually connected with the mine well all the plans said it did but they were unsure so they devised all sorts of methods to finding out and they decided what they would probably do was drop down a closed circuit television camera to have a look it was around this time that my colleague harry pairman and i got involved and we said well we'll go down and have a look that hadn't occurred to anybody so after signing a very fiercely worded indemnity form we went down the well shaft and got into the mine absolutely beautiful condition now the reason the whale shaft connected with the mine is that in 1920 the borough engineer of dartford decided that this chalk mine would make a very good soak away to drain a load of the raid roads around dartford so a sewer was put in to connect to the top of the well shaft and about four miles of road were drained into the mine and still do that started the underground chambers beautiful art shape which gives it a very strong mechanical cross section and you can see the tide line there that's the height at which it floods in heavy rain fortunately it wasn't raining from the time we were there you can also go underground for building stone now if you think of building stone and kent immediately think of kentish ragstone and you would think the most of it came from the huge open quarries around highs and maidstone which had been worked from roman times and that's quite true but sometimes for local work they actually went underground this is a plan of an underground quarry or a series of underground quarries near western now i always used to call this a ragstone quarry but i was taken to task by geologist apparently it's not rag stone because the lime content is not high enough so can only call it a hard building stone i don't think the the people who dug it knew that because it was used in all the local buildings um there's some photographs of the timeless in there or galleries the rag stone is the dark layer at the bottom it's the hardest stone it started from probably the early 17th century which is the ones at the top at the north worked right the way down to the last one series six at the bottom and series five which are thought to have been dug in 1914 to make um some new cottages on the nearby common the method of working was just to dig straight in from the hillside or quarry face to straight into the hillside with just a few joining passages another underground rockstone quarry maidstone one of a number shows a totally different way of working what looks like random odd moving passages are actually passages through a load of dead material because the miners only want the good stone they didn't want all the waste stone that went with it so in this case they took out large quantities of stone and kept the roof up with putting the old stone the waste material called deads and walling up behind dry stone walling so the passages you see there are just walkways through to the end working faces that's some of the dry stone walling it's very fissured and many many cracks in that particular quarry my colleague is standing under half a ton of of rock which is held up by sheer willpower i didn't tell him that until after and i took the photograph Sand Mining they are sand mining how can you mine sand it just fall in but no mine uh sand has been extensively mined in kent and in sorry normally the folks and beds of the lower green sand it's actually it stands up quite well having tunnels dug in it this is a rather elaborate entrance to a sand mine at chipstid near southern oaks it was dug to get uh sand out to use in association with the whiting works in the 1880s and there's some of the galleries uh the brickwork around the bottom of the pillars were put in in world war ii as it used in it as an airaid shelter wonderful condition again but it's very odd when you're surveying it and you take the tape to the end of a gallery you can push the tape in a couple of inches into the soft sand walls there are extensive mines around march stand around newnam court and near the great danes hotel that one was even open to the public briefly in the 1960s by the owner of chisel earthquakes who opened it to the public now the second reason for digging holes Underground Chapels in the ground was because you want space for instant here not little thing an underground chapel this is a nicholas wade accessed by the cellar of a house made of chalk blocks beautifully built it's thought to be late medieval there was another one near manson known as nashcork cave and that one was actually um in our closure kentiana volume 22 of 1878 there was a brief mention of it sadly i've been told it's completely falling in now i'm sure you'll recognize that aerial photograph of canterbury cathedral now you wouldn't think there's much underground in canterbury cathedral but there is is what's known as the great dream the blue line is the drain which goes around the cathedral goes across through the town wall and originally discharged into the town ditch it's now piped and goes into the style this actually takes all of the water from the roof of the cathedral and has done for considerable length of time it was prior whibert between 1390 and 1411 which brought in the first water supply to the cathedral from springs to the north and he also started the drain this was uh completed and extended by a prior gold stone in the 15th century but it's still there and it's still taking the water it's been repaired a number of times one on the left you can see various types of stone tudor brickwork khan stone at the bottom flint chalk blocks little opening to the left is one of the shoots which goes up to the roof of the cathedral that brings the the water down in another section there's some beautiful pipe work lead pipe work and it's uh actually built into the drain it's almost contemporary with the drain and this very possibly is part of prior wibits original pipe work we didn't dare turn off that stop cop while we're on the subject of water ice Ice Wells wells before the coming of refrigerations large estates if you wanted to keep your uh drinks nice and cool you had ice collected in the winter this is one lee's court fairly standard design a large brickline pit which would be filled with layers of ice and straw the entrance passage always faced north so the sun wouldn't go on it and earth piled on the top now in most bigger states the ice would be taken off um local homes or lakes if there wasn't any lakes you could use compacted snow or you could have ice imported because ice importation was a great business in 1884 the uk imported 3 000 tons of ice over 300 000 tons of ice from norway alone so it's rather big business in towns where people wanted to store ice they'd use modified sellers but in great end there was rather an odd one this is a classic um ice world type but in the middle of a town this one a whole collapsed place called horn's yard to the north of of gravesend market in 2001 and we went to have a look at it and it was this classic ice well what had happened in 18 oh desperately trying to remember this 1850 there was a large fire in that area of gravesend which destroyed much of the houses and buildings there and whilst they were rebuilding it somebody had an idea to build this ice world and we know it was when all the buildings were finished we know that in 1884 it was um a fish monger that had the building next to it and there were the two entrances there was a stairway which went up to the cellar of the fishmongers and there was another sloping entrance which went up to the yard in which probably had where the ice was delivered Shelter and the big other reason is going underground is for shelter first people to shelter is thousands of years ago oldbury rockshelter is engaged to middle paleolithic when we think of shells will be more likely think of this this is world war one damage in um landscape after a zeppelin dropped some bombs now that britain came under attack from zeppelins in the first world war and then in 1917 and the worst threat was the gosu heavier than air bombers which took a higher load and bombing started in earnest and people started digging underground shelters this is a wonderful photograph from the daily mirror from 1917 showing a group of volunteers digging a dugout as they were called somewhere in southern england we think that's somewhere in the dover area it was obviously very posed those ladies shoes don't look as though they've been digging chalk for a couple of hours because in 1917 a lot of the shelters were do-it-yourself shelters and local volunteers came together to dig shelters their letter was sent out by the chief constable of ramsgate for volunteers to dig shelters for the population this one was discovered in 2012 when they were starting to do some footings for astor i believe strange shape says tunnel comes in goes around in a loop back out again two or three on thanet have got that same shape quite small enough for a couple of dozen people in the little bench cut in the side so you could sit down the larger shelters were dug by professionals usually the army local army the tunneling companies which came down to help out this is one that was dug by the army through the ellington school ramsgate the old school was pulled down and whilst they were setting out some footings for some new buildings a hole was found which led into the shelter much more elderly plan and in beautiful condition again used in false first world war and also in the second you can see there the remains of wooden supports for bench seats unfortunately bench seats and the electric lighting was taken out after the second world war but when you went down into the shelter you were expected to carry on doing your school work so we're not quite sure how many essays the chap had to write having done this graffiti on the wall a beautiful drawing of pop iron done in 1944 virtually any tunnel that could be found could be used as a shelter was used these are some at dover um some were dug in world war ii shelters others had been there previously the one on the right shows people leaving the shelter after a night underground on the right there's children in bunks in the dam for the cold whole factories had shelters underground this one is at north fleet um there were sort of tentative plans to try and preserve these ones and open them to the public but uh i fear that's got bogged down and nothing happens there are other ones for the shorts factory at rochester and they could it was said they could evacuate the whole of the esplanade factory into the tunnels behind in four minutes i never believed that until i actually went down them and it's true they're very extensive Documents now it's not just people you want to shelter you want to shelter material and in this case documents just before the second world war the woolwich building society decided to up sticks and go down near western and they dug this underground shelter as a document store for all their deeds for mortgages etc a long sloping entrance went up to the surface with a couple of access shafts for emergency access when we went to have a look at it only that shaft there was still accessible and there's a lady from the kent history forum descending it now unfortunately those tunnels were only expected to last a few years and they're not very good condition at the moment [Music] because they they line the walls with simple plasterboard which is now almost rotten and falling away the picture on the left shows it in use with all the documents so if anybody listening to this has got a house which had deeds from the woolwich building society in world war ii they almost certainly would have been at store the entrance shaft to it is now is completely sealed and it's uh inaccessible now the military went underground that's the cliff based dover where you can clearly see the entrances to tunnels i do wish i'd kept the letter i received from the ministry of works in the 1970s because i wrote to them at dover castle asking would it be possible to have a look at the tunnels in the cliff and the dover castle and i was told in no uncertain terms that there were no tunnels in the cliff at dover well you can plainly see them but at the time they were fitting them out as a regional seat of government in the cold war so you can i suppose see what they were getting at Tunnels there are three levels of tunnels there the first one was there the doug was called cased mate the blue one there that was dug in napoleonic times to house men and officers as an underground barracks world war ii is taken over and used as a an operation center operation dynamo the evacuation of dunkirk was undertaken from tunnels in casemate level they then wanted to build or dig large combined operation center which was going to be known as bastion level which was going to be around here above casemate slightly below what became annex unfortunately they had a number of roof falls there's a rumor that one of the tunneling company engineers was killed in a roof fall and it was sealed off and abandoned it's still there and occasionally the um sort of people experts go down there and try and have a look for it but the skirt is inaccessible next with doug was annex level there's a dormitory and first aid station and then finally dumpy level in 1942. annex level and casemate level are open to the public and well worth a visit dumpy levels sadly isn't because of accessibility it's only accessible by a very steep staircase or a 1963 lift which takes four people at a time as well as these tunnels there were plans for other tunnels under the glyphs carrying on the uh the alphabet with annex at the top case mate bastian dumpy there's going to be esplanade level at the level at the bottom of the cliffs and then foundation level under that they were never ever built Counter Mines that's a 3d uh of the tunnels sebastian was going to be actually quite huge but as i say all sealed off now there are some fans to open dumpy levels by putting a ramp on the outside of the cliffs and going down but of course that would take incredible amount of money and sadly english heritage is a bit short of cash at the moment but while we're in the area of dover this is an aerial photograph of dover looking from the north and not many people know that from here a whole series of tunnels goes out because when it was thought that the french were going to land it was decided that the northern part of dover castle was the most vulnerable to underground mining so these counter mines were dug two sets on three levels the idea was you would have men stationed in them and if they heard people tunneling towards them all the ends of those tunnels will be filled with barrels of gunpowder then the nearer they the french came when it was obvious they were quite close somebody would uh light the blue touch paper and run extremely fast to the axo shaft where the explosions would destroy the the enemy mines luckily it was never ever used so some of the parts i i've shown you uh aren't accessible easily by people and many are sealed just after we've visited but you can go underground to see some examples of what we've been talking about and also some wonderful things to see the shell grotto at margate if you've never been please do so an enigmatic little thing with about four and a half million shells adorning the roof of rose walls everywhere well worth a visit an example of a small chalk mine dug for lime burning is margay caves which uh after being shot for quite a time have been reopened sadly only to fall victim to the pandemic so hopefully they should be open later in may they were rediscovered in 1807 and the owner of the land turned them into his private grotto had lots of packs on the walls etc even dug two ice wells underground but again it's it's well worth a visit if you're you're in the area if you want to see a really large chalk Chiselers Caves wine dug for lime burning there's the famous chiselers caves this is a view of the map in the map room underground you can see caves are marks saxons druids and romans that's because a rather eccentric archaeologist called dr william nichols went down there published a couple of papers in 1903 and four and decided they were dug by the romans druids and saxons sadly not they were mainly of uh 18th and 19th century development but well worth the visit um the guided tours go in every hour you've got a hurricane lamp to hold [Music] you can only go by guided tours and the guides are quite entertaining and military tunnels apart from the dover there's fan bay to the east of dover national trust property it was a underground shelter first aid station for a gun battery one of the coastal gun batteries there were quite a few of these shelters many of them now sealed off unfortunately Ramsgate Tunnel one of the biggest ones you can see is at ramsgate before the second world war ramsgate started building this tunnel system under the town absolute massive undertaking and it could take up to 60 000 people and part of it is now open to the public and again well worth a visit it's uh the entrance to it um now down the bottom left goes in through an old railway tunnel one of the entrances at the top left as it was during the war and some of the tunnels were had bunks in this is little johnny being tucked up and cluddles are still there well worth it now i this evening i haven't been able to show you all the types of sites there are out there otherwise we'd be here for a considerable time but uh i hope it's given you just an idea of what can be there and finally if you're on an archaeological field walk or something you come across a bit of field that looks like this do take care don't let granny jump up and down on it because it could turn into that but if it does do let us know because we'd like to go down and have a look at it i think that's about it anybody got any questions Questions great well look thank you very much um rod that was really fascinating and wonderful wonderful visuals um there are a few questions um just uh on the two two for me just quickly on the um woolwich uh kind of sort of um archive that you showed i mean i presume all those documents were taken out they weren't all just left there right and on the shell grotto um you know there's lots of speculation on the history of that grotto do you have any personal opinion about how old it is and you know it's a very mysterious sort of place so i remember going there a few years ago it was like from the phoenicians and things like this what do you think it's from um well i don't think it was the phoenicians um i think that's one of the lovely things about the show grotto is no one is absolutely sure um if i had to guess i would say it probably started life for something like a very small denial three chambered deen hall which was then expanded and then decorated um but in some respects it'd be a shame if it was found out because it has it's such a lovely little site good right so we've got some questions here um uh any new ideas so this is from david white any new ideas on the well at salmstone is that salvas or soundstorms grange do you have any kind of and the other the second one from rosemary harbard is why are they called dean holes what's the reason for that um the psalmist and grange i'm i'm sure one of our chapters has got some stuff on that but for the top of my head i can't remember on sorry um dean holds ah well so it was a victorians that started using it um the word dean means wooded valley whole is well whole so dean hole hole in a small wooded valley there's some of them are in shallow valleys perhaps that's um the older writers just called them pits or chalk wells chalk holes draw pits you know but dean hole sounded more romantic so i suppose the victorians used it Woolwich good and now um just i think this is a comment you might want to comment on the comment but from marilyn um the woolwich headquarters at bexleyheath apparently also used to store deeds in a huge underground store the deeds were protected by an inert gas and there was a robot that accessed the boxes of documents i used to look after the computer system that serviced it it became redundant after the dematerialization of deeds in 2003. i don't know if you do anything about that that's um uh and then and then i didn't actually i knew when the of the woolly site when they did the bexleyheath site uh was sort of um demolished another found a load of um cesspits old medieval suspects etc there but uh but i didn't know they they um stored stuff in a gas i assume was argon or something like that oh no that's why i know very interesting yeah uh so uh i don't know um now there's a question here um about um from jillian about why is it that well's around does that shape make for a stronger structure yes it is stronger a circle is a very strong um mechanical shape so the pressure from the sides of the earth pressing on it as you know after it was dug and kept it rigid also it was the easiest to dig a chap would sit in the bottom with a with a small pick and just cross-legged just go round and round in circles almost and just keep going down using the the bucket on a rope as a plum bob i don't particularly like wells that they're always full of carbon dioxide Brickfields and then this is from james leach um he thanks you for the interesting talk um it was interesting to learn he says about the chalk mines association with brickfields and he asks are there any public books or publications that provide further information about these minds and brickfield that you might suggest for further reading sadly not um there were so many of these brickfields and if they were making yellow stocks there would have been a chalk mine very nearby or was certainly under it and if you look at some of the large scale alternate survey about 25 inch to the mile often made mark shafts or little circles sometimes they call them wells and a lot of them unfortunately were built over i'd be very loath to um talk too much about where they were because they'd scare the heck out of people but um sadly there that there is nothing written on them um a few binds have been recorded and written up i mean the dartford one is on the the ks website Dumpy and then in terms of accessibility and there's a point by someone um saying that uh now then english heritage um have a members day where you were taken on a guided tour around dumpy and it was well worth a visit i don't know if you are aware of that dumpy i presume is uh yes um occasionally dumpy you can get down i've been down a few times with a crater years ago um uh it would be lovely to see it opened up even more but um unfortunately they just can't get the number of people down there great well thank you very much rod um Conclusion you kindly said if anyone finds a sort of hole opening up in their garden or uh somewhere like that then you would be um available presumably not yourself to go down but one of your teams uh no i i i tend to go in the walk-around ones now [Laughter] so you're sort of retired from the uh uh sort of front line but still active behind the scenes so that's that's main thread we're really grateful um for the talk you gave tonight i mean it's really really fascinating thank you very much this will go online um in the next few days um so do please like it uh and uh you know kind of leave any comments any other questions i'm sure if you um were to uh leave them then we'd be very very happy um to uh you know kind of um uh pass them on to rod uh there is a number of other speaks uh talks coming up um i'll put them up here so we've got one um in fact in may um our own steve willis again um there's one at the end of this month that's all up here and then another one in june and july i hope you've enjoyed this talk this is part of our aim to kind of educate inform and engage with issues around the history and the archaeology of ken i'm sure you'll agree that was a really fascinating talk by rod who has not only kind of investigated these kind of often very very difficult to access features but has written about them and i expertly lectured on them thank you very much and i look forward to seeing you at future events good night