Secret Passages

The books! Over seven hundred of them and still counting...
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Chrissie777
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Chrissie777 »

That was a fantastic link...thanks for posting it here :D[/quote]

http://www.ehow.com/how_5974589_build-s ... kcase.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://wiki.ask.com/Secret_passage" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 31429.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Have fun! :)
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Chrissie777
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Chrissie777 »

Fatty wrote:If anyone thought an underground passage from Kirrin Island to the mainland was far-fetched, how about a network of stone-age tunnels weaving from Scotland to Turkey? They don't all link up, unfortunately.
Thnaks, Fatty, I added it to my amazon.de cart. Great tip!
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Chrissie777 »

[quote="Viv of Ginger Pop"]
How would you fancy sleeping in a passage, with around 8,000 other people?
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/c/c ... index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fascinating article. Thanks!
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Chrissie777 »

[quote="poddys"]
I remember growing up in Poole in the 1960's that there used to be tunnels in the sandstone cliffs at Whitecliff Rec. In my early teens I used to be able to crawl through them, they were about 100yds long, but you could only crawl, not crouch or stand.

Your story of Poole reminds me of an unforgettable CFF movie that I watched years ago, "The Carringford School Mystery". It had a secret passage from a small island in a pond to some cliffs by the sea. I wonder if that film for kids has been filmed near Poole?
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Chrissie777 »

Katharine wrote:Orford Castle is in East Anglia. I went there last year, but I can't picture a bit with walls you could walk between. It's reasonably close to the sea - there's a good view from the top. There's also Languard Fort at Felixstowe which is right next to the water. There are a lot of underground passages there.
Mind you, we only had a flying visit to Orford Castle as we went there just before it closed, so it's possible we missed a bit.
Try to visit it again. The outside walk between the two walls might have been for the guards who could also look outside the windows to see if some baddies were approaching?
I saw some sea gulls or doves nesting in the windows, so I guess most tourists didn't even explore the passages between the two outer walls and the birds felt relatively undisturbed.
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Moonraker »

Well done, Chrissie: you managed to do a proper quote! :D
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Chrissie777 »

Nigel, unfortunately it only works that way when I don't shorten the quote. :oops:
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Chrissie777 »

Fiona1986 wrote:Sounds exciting, Chrissie! Did you find any baddies hiding there?
In case you missed it when I said it before, if you're quoting someone and edit out part of the quote you need to leave
at the end of it, or the quote doesn't appear properly.[/quote]

No baddies, just doves/sea gulls :).
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by MJE »

Viv of Ginger Pop wrote:I think that every school should have a secret passage...
     Just came upon this long-running thread, which I seem to have overlooked before.
     I seem to recall, so dimly I wouldn't absolutely swear that something couldn't have gone wrong with my memory, that my old school in Adelaide had a secret tunnel - or so the rumour that I heard went. It supposedly led from a nearby railway station (I think) and went underneath the school, and came out underneath the stage in the school hall. This was probably a distance of quarter of a mile or something. Why it was constructed, I have no idea - I wonder if to do with the war (I or II) or something - not sure.
     I recall thinking that I'd really like to go into it, but knew I'd likely never get the chance. And I don't even remember where I heard the rumour, so it could be quite mistaken. Once or twice I've tried Googling for anything about it, but so far have found nothing.

     Also during my Adelaide years, I do seem to remember - again, the memory is very vague now - learning of an abandoned tunnel of some sort in the hills and planning to join a couple of other kids at school to go and explore it. For some reason we never did, though. (I wonder if there's any web site called something like "Secret tunnels in Adelaide".)

     I once decided to start digging a secret passage in an undeveloped part of the garden, and set to work. I planned to go downwards, then a few yards down to start going horizontally. However, the initial hole never got beyond about three feet deep: I don't recall why I stopped, but maybe it was the realization that digging tunnels was *hard work*, especially with the amount of clay, stones, and so on.
     It's probably fortunate that I stopped eventually, because it would have been very dangerous to continue, especially if I reached the point of starting to horizontally, because cave-ins would become a serious hazard. I think I had vague plans of shoring it up with beams of wood, like I'd read about in some Blyton book or other, but certainly had no clear idea how I'd do that - and certainly wouldn't have known how to do it *properly*.
     I really don't know what my parents thought of this, because I don't recall anyone saying anything about the danger of it. Maybe they knew all along I'd give up long before it reached the point of starting to be dangerous.
     Neither of my brothers was involved in this tunnel-digging: they read Enid Blyton, but I think far less prolifically than I did; and I think they got into her imaginative world far less than I did. And I know from odd conversations more recently, where Enid Blyton may briefly come up, that they don't remember much about her books any more: they certainly don't remember any actual stories in any detail, and don't even remember book titles - all the books, even all the series, just blur into a sameness for them. (My older brother read only Famous Fives anyway - the younger one probably read at least some books from a few series.) And they probably think I don't remember any longer either.

    Not much later than this, at my cousins' place, a vertical hole 10 or 15 feet deep was actually successfully dug. I'm not quite sure if my cousins did it or my uncle, or maybe both - I do seem to associate it with one of my cousins for some reason, even though he would have been quite a young child at the time. But I think it was for the practical purpose of acting as a cellar for wine, and had nothing to do with acting out Blyton scenarios. And it was so used for a time. (Seems an odd thing to do, but that's what I remember; I'll ask my uncle or aunt about it next time I visit them.)
     I don't know how they coped with the safety angle of it: my uncle was an engineer, so maybe he was able to ensure it was safe. Recently, when I've seen that site, I can see the remnants of the hole, but it's now filled up with twigs and branches and other debris. I don't know if it was filled deliberately to prevent anyone falling in, or whether all that stuff just drifted in there over the years - because the hole certainly isn't properly filled in with dirt or anything, and you can still see down several feet amongst all the branches filling it.

Regards, Michael.
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Moonraker »

Chrissie777 wrote:
Moonraker wrote:Well done, Chrissie: you managed to do a proper quote! :D
Nigel, unfortunately it only works that way when I don't shorten the quote. :oops:
Make sure your quoted passage starts with {quote} or if you want to use a name, {quote="Nigel"}. Then paste/write in your quoted excerpt. At the end of the quote, ensure you finish it off with {/quote}

Alternatively, click on the Quote box in the post that you want to quote from, and again, making sure you don't delete the {quote} and {/quote} boxes, delete the parts you don't want to quote.

Note that I have used { and } instead of [ and ], as this post would be one long quote! Make sure you use the [ ] brackets.

If you click on Preview before submitting, you will see if you've done it correctly. Most of your quotes that haven't come out properly just need a {/quote} adding at the end. (Again, use [ ] brackets).

Test Paper
Go back to an old post where it hasn't come out properly, and add the missing end quote. 10 marks if you correct it successfully! :D
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by MJE »

Chrissie777 wrote:Nigel, unfortunately it only works that way when I don't shorten the quote. :oops:
     That shouldn't make any difference: All that is necessary is that, for each quoted passage, you begin with this (which I will write spaced out to prevent from acting - but it should be typed closed up, with no spaces):

  [ quote = " name of person quoted " ]

and end with this:

  [ / quote ]

Whether you edit the text in between is immaterial, although if you edit it, you've got to make sure those tags remain in the proper place. If you want two separate quotes with your response in between (the way I often do), then the extra tags have to be typed in yourself, as when the window opens up they are there just once automatically for the entire quoted post.

Regards, Michael.
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by lwindrush »

Don't all children at one stage or another in the back garden attempt to dig a tunnel all the way to Australia? We got several feet down caked in mud and ripped trousers before our mother sent us to bed.
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by MJE »

MJE wrote:    Not much later than this, at my cousins' place, a vertical hole 10 or 15 feet deep was actually successfully dug. I'm not quite sure if my cousins did it or my uncle, or maybe both - I do seem to associate it with one of my cousins for some reason, even though he would have been quite a young child at the time.
     Come to think of it, I think this may have been a number of years later, when the cousin was in his teens, perhaps - probably not quite the small child I initially implied.

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Tunnel to other side of world?

Post by MJE »

lwindrush wrote:Don't all children at one stage or another in the back garden attempt to dig a tunnel all the way to Australia? We got several feet down caked in mud and ripped trousers before our mother sent us to bed.
     I don't know. I don't seem to have known anyone else who did it - I just got the idea myself because I was so immersed in Enid Blyton's world at the time.
     But it does remind me that one of my more eccentric expressions of creativity as a child was that I drew a series of cartoon strips, and they were about a worm vs. an octopus. Modelled on the Sylvester/Tweety or Coyote/Road Runner kind of conflict, my cartoons were about the octopus's constant attempts to catch the worm for his next meal and the worm's constant attempts to evade capture. Both of these characters had their own families, who sometimes came into the stories too. Both parties were engaged in constant and incredibly complex attempts to outwit each other.
     And in one of these I had a tunnel going down into the ground (there were *lots* of tunnels in this, actually - and, oddly enough, the octopus lived on land, in a tunnel - not in water at all) - but this particular tunnel went straight down, and the octopus, and later the worm too, fell into it, and it went straight down, right through the middle of the earth, and came up on the other side of the world! And if you fell in, you had just enough momentum (this is probably very dubious physics) that you would come out the other end and go up into the air and then fall down again onto the ground - quite unharmed.
     And to illustrate that we were on the other side of the world, I showed Chinese people with funny hats working in the fields and speaking Chinese (I put mock Chinese writing into the speech balloons), forgetting that, from Australia (presumably where these were set) China was not at all the other side of the world. (Probably all terribly politically incorrect and stereotype-ridden.)
     I think I got the idea from seeing a similar tunnel once on a Bugs Bunny cartoon on T.V., where someone came out the other end and found Chinese people - and if that was set in America, that was probably more reasonable. But I don't think I thought about matters like that too deeply at the time.
     These cartoons I did were not just short strips like you see in newspapers: they were quite long stories such as you see in comic books of the sort that were commonly available. Each of my cartoon adventures was on a sheet of foolscap paper and occupied both sides, and each page was divided into 7 horizontal strips, and I went through them all, drawing several panels in each strip. So the stories were quite complex, actually.
     I did about four or five of these, and there was a final, unfinished one, probably representing where I either lost interest or perhaps got myself into a plot hole I couldn't get out of.
     I think I still have them somewhere - I am hardly able to throw out anything at all. I just hope silverfish haven't eaten them up by now. I haven't actually seen them for at least a few decades, and I don't remember where they are. I devised the stories on my own and drew all the pictures myself in pencil. There were tons of underground passages in the stories, since all the characters lived in tunnels or caves.
     I started a second series which seemed to be about fleas infesting a man, and the conflict between them. I fear that, for many, reading this would really make their scalp itch, though; I can't imagine where I got such a bizarre idea for a comic strip. This series didn't last so long, though, and I think I only did about one and a half stories in this.

Regards, Michael.
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Re: Secret Passages

Post by Katharine »

I remember when playing on the local beach we used to try and dig all the way down to Australia. If we managed to dig a hole deep enough to be able to hide our knees we thought we'd done a good days work :roll:

All these comments have reminded me of a hole I discovered in the back garden of my previous house. It was a long thin garden, something like 12 feet wide and 120 feet long. The hole was about 10 to 15 feet from the end fence, so quite a way from the house. It was full of bricks, some of which looked as though they must have come from the fireplace that would have been in the kitchen as they were sooty. I think there were also edging tiles possibly from a hearth. There were also a lot of sticks in the hole. I didn't get very in my explorations as I discovered it around the time I was expecting my first child and didn't think it a very good idea to go exploring when pregnant. Then we felt it was dangerous to leave it open with a young family so we filled it up with earth.

I know we excavated a good few feet down, and there appeared to be no end to it. One theory we came up with was that as the house had been built in the Victorian era, possibly before mains drainage it may have been some kind of personal cess pit. In which case, maybe it's a good thing we didn't explore further. The other theory someone came up with was that whoever renovated the house in previous years and removed the kitchen chimney just dug a hole in the garden and burried all the debris.
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