The Best Hidden Underground Secrets In The World | Underground Britain | Spark

there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches Britain's a small island with an extraordinary past and amazing landscapes what we see above ground is only half the story I'm traveling the length and breadth of our country to see it from a whole new perspective Underground I'm Rob Bell and I'm on a Subterranean Mission I'm exploring the Mysteries and wonders that lie right under our feet [Music] it's possible from man-made to natural wonders it's just so much to take in [Applause] there's a real presence down here this is an adventure of those places beneath the surface a journey through underground Britain [Music] this time I'm in Scotland I'm discovering the Wonders it holds beneath the soil oh it's already quite tight I'm climbing into an Ice Age World That Time Forgot in your way through discovering how power comes from deep inside a mountain it feels like you're in the middle of James Bond villain villain and sliding into a vast man-made Cavern that helped win World War II there's not much room to maneuver it my Journey Begins on the Northeast Coast and a place with a deep and dark story it has an intriguing name the stalkers cave foreign the rocky shores near Elgin are home to Windswept Cliffs and remote Sally Bays it's an area rich in human history good and bad I've come here to visit a cave that's revealed quite chilling secrets from throughout the ages it's said to have been a place that for thousands of years witnessed rituals and burials so I've come to try and find out more and see if I can get to the bottom of exactly what went on down there but first things first I've got to get right down there and it's 30 meters at the bottom of these Cliffs oh a steep and at high tide there's no easy access the only way down is by Road oh it's very easy start so this is there it's uh straight onto the cliff yep we're off it's good it's a great way to access caves oh that feels good [Music] back down on the old terraforma oh it's quite some entrance that's what I'm looking for tucked away in the Dark Shadows under the cliff this here is sculptor's cave and even on a sunny day like this it's all hidden away underneath in the shadows of the cliffs here so it's got quite a gloomy dark and a bit chilly kind of feeling to it just constantly but if you come over here uh yeah have a look up here this is why it's called sculptor's cave because on the left you've got three ovals that are carved in and then to the right what's apparently carved in the shape of a flower now these are almost instantly recognizable to experts as being from one of the most mysterious and enigmatic peoples that ever lived on British Shores pigs the pects were not one but probably several ancient tribes which lived all along the eastern coast of Scotland [Music] they were renowned and impressive culture but to this day very little details actually known about them [Music] have been dated to around 600 A.D but their exact meaning remained a mystery some believe that they were a warning to others to keep out of here but what was so threatening about the sculptor's cave the Curious symbols prompted one bold archaeologist Sylvia Benton to start Excavating at the back of the caves 25 meters from the entrance in the 1920s and what she found there shocked her to the Core Professor Ian armit has been following in the archaeologist's footsteps when Sylvia bent and the first excavator started walking in the cave she was Finding lots of evidence for Fairly precious objects elaborate gold covered hearings bronze pins that kind of thing the type of jewelry was about 3 000 years old from the bridge hidden here one and a half thousand years before the pigs carved their symbols but shiny stuff wasn't all the archaeologists uncovered they also found human remains often but the most extraordinary finds really were at least about 2 000 human bones that were found scattered around the deposits inside the cave most of these bones are at least a large proportion of them belong to children so you've got children's bodies being disposed of within the cave itself and the children's skeletons revealed a shocking surprise their skulls were missing some Oddities amongst those bones and that for example there were very few uh cranial fragments fragments in the skull represented so it seems that parts of the bodies were being taken away or removed or different activities were happening with them Sylvia Benton was completely baffled she had no idea where the children's skulls had been taken or why that question wouldn't be answered for at least another 50 years in the 1970s there was another excavation in the cave by Ian Shepherd and he excavated in the entrance areas he did find skull remains and he found skoda means of of young children between around the ages of about six and nine which matched the same ages of the children that were sort of Ages yeah yeah and even particular mandibles the remains of the lower job which seem to have you know fallen from the skull and become Incorporated in the archaeological deposits as they built up Ian Shepherd had the brainwave that these children's heads had been deliberately removed from their bodies after death and were hung up around the entrance of the cave but why I track the bones down to the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh this is one that was found at the front of the occasion yes this was found at the entrance to the cave on some of the skull fragments scientists have found tiny Telltale scuff marks this is evidence of polishing or abrasion and it may have been to remove flesh from this child's school as part of processing of the headphone display [Music] wow sounds these children's heads were being severed from their bodies after death skinned and hung up like decorations tiny gold herrings found with the skulls are probably an added decoration that's been remarkably well preserved they were probably adorning the children's heads at the entrance to the cave these heads were being groomed they were being prepared and they were being looked after four display purposes [Music] today this practice seems alien gruesomely appalling but was it seem the same way three thousand years ago when it happened this isn't a disrespectful act this is something quite important quite emotional homage to the dead room It's oddly that you use that road respect for and for us for well for me at least you know to have your head chopped off after you've died that doesn't for me seem respectful but this is a completely different era it's already clear that the sculptor's cave is a gateway to a very different time but the children's bones aren't the only skeletons here this was also a site of execution [Music] I'm exploring underground Scotland here in the sculptors cave I've discovered a place of mysterious symbols and the bones of long dead children this is a cave of the Dead in many parts of the world and in many parts of History caves have been seen as places where you sort of communicate with the Underworld the sort of entrances to other worlds so it makes sense in a way that that's where you put your dead you put them in a place that's that's in an entrance if you like to the spirit world or the underworld part of that is marking the entrance marking that kind of Gateway from the world of the living to the world of the Dead there's a real presence down here but there's another even more gruesome twist to this intriguing place it's not only children's bones that have been found here adult Bones have been on Earth too and they reveal a dark story once again the necks had been severed these vertebrae which display evidence of cut marks which were always assumed to be late Bronze Age actually these cut marks like they were done with an iron blade an iron weapon these adult bones were radiocarbon dated to 300 A.D over a thousand years after the Headless children skeletons and in a time of iron Weaponry which explains the Clean Cut marks these are the the first and second vertebra of the neck so we're talking about decapitation once again we are we are and unlike the children's skulls the cut marks on the adult bones reveal an H on age story of Bloody execution this vertebra here actually has up to 11 cut marks on it the angle of the cut Mark suggests that the individuals would have been in a kneeling position with the chins onto their chests and certainly in the case of this individual they'd have had to have been held in place certainly after the first blow it's amazing I mean this is this is kind of like forensics putting together the evidence for a murder case now you know looking at all the evidence that we've got and being meticulous with absolutely every detail story that several Iron Age adults were killed here 1700 years ago the character of the activity in the cave seems to have changed quite markedly once we get into the Iron Age because the vertebrae would suggest that we're actually seeing you know a significant number of people being executed in the cave being decapitated so put me down down on their knees don't you think that's why the first cut would have killed even if the head didn't come off the person would be dead so someone's supporting that body to enable the second two or three chops to go in so really more than one person involved in the execution and a very formalized process for person after person wow I mean that's freaky just being down there in a cave on my knees I'm going to get back up it must have been a bloodbath but why did it happen it appears that quite a number of people were executed possibly at one time so you're looking probably a you know a big political or religious or act on both on a significant scale [Music] when these executions happen Scotland was separated from what's now England by Hadrian's Wall the Romans considered everyone living here to the north of the wall to be barbarians the people executed here could have been tribesmen deliberately slaughtered by their rivals in this symbolic and ominous place where centuries earlier children's bodies had been placed and their skulls displayed two distinct periods a thousand years apart but yet there's something quite spiritual or special about these caves given that we know that Sylvia Benton found a place strewn with human bone undoubtedly at the time when these executions were carried out the place would have been strewn with human bone as well so that you'd have been in no doubt that this was a place of the Dead even then this was such an important place yeah that's right everybody would know that really is an amazing carvings marking the spot where two very different types of decapitation happened separated by a thousand years it's another world that will be hard to shake out of my memory for a very long time [Music] the next stage of my journey through underground Scotland brings me forward over one and a half thousand years to the modern day I've come in search of hidden power [Music] just look at that there's some View the Scottish Wilderness with mountain tops as far as the eye can see it's a beautiful picture-perfect natural landscape or so it may seem because this Lake behind me is in fact entirely man-made I've come halfway up Ben crooked Mountain to an artificial Reservoir designed to trap up to 10 million cubic meters of Rainwater but the water here isn't for drinking this is stored power a good 400 meters beneath me pass the dam and into the mountain itself lies one of Scotland's Most Fascinating engineering achievements this is the home of instant energy 24 7. built in the 1950s the huge huge in Project hit a whole Power Station inside the mountain it was state of the art technology even the queen came to open it to get to the heart of how this place works we're driving deep into the mountain so this is your uh this is your commute to work yes don't enter into the stations to get get busy down here sometimes is it traffic nightmare we're calling myself down and down deep inside uh been cruising itself the tunnel itself was dug by guys who are known as the tunnel tigers the majority came from Donegal in Ireland and uh they would come specifically to excavate the tunnel so it was all manual labor so they would have been spending most of their time Underground in this yeah in this mountain it's really a hard physical labor no kidney just uh digging out these tunnels this tunnel alone took a year to complete over a thousand men drilled and blasted their way through 220 000 cubic meters of granite this is a right in the heart of the mountain brilliant hang on I lost this space it's just enormous the power station itself is housed inside this gigantic man-made cabin as long is the length of a football pitch [Applause] almost feels like you're in the middle of James Bond villain's layout much further down as well so there's four different levels could be dug out by hand over 50 years after it was built it's easy to forget this place exists hidden away up here in the mountains but these four generators have been not so quietly getting on with producing electricity for all over Britain ever since so the waters rushing through these pipes here into those turbines when the water is released from the reservoir above it rushes down huge pipes to the underground power station where it turns gigantic rotors inside the turbines station is capable generating 440 megawatts of electricity enough to power a city this size of Edinburgh but what's really special about this place is that it was built to help solve a major power supply problem coping when there's extreme need on the National Grid all right Rob so this is it this is a central control room for for Creek and Power Station this is where everything happens this is the brains behind the operations this is uh Kevin Roy he's one of our Engineers good to me this is great and you can control and monitor everything from your seat here you know the seat of power from this ordinary looking control room in the heart of the Mountainside the demand for electricity on the grid is constantly monitored Kevin talk me through what have we got here sure we have each unit we have four units as you're aware of yeah our energy managing or requiring creaking unit two on at four o'clock whenever there's a massive surge in demand for electricity say when everyone puts the kettle on in the advert break for this program the National Grid turns to krugen for a much needed boost what looks like a couple of minutes time we're going to need to wake up from zero to 120 megawatts off unit two okay hang on what's what's that so that noise we've just heard there is the five minute warning and you get a five minute warning from National Grid yes and a phone call as well that phone call isn't from National Grid okay fine good National Grid contact us here under on the green phone I love that on the green the special green phone it's only got one line absolutely crookin it's a national grid cooking is the vital Safety Net in the system this place stops the lights going out and keeps your TV on that goes to 58 30 yeah we'll get you to initiate the start button the first person to switch the power on in 1959 was the Queen Boom boom oh there it is with a tiny click I've just released 200 tons of water per second into the generators of course you can't see any of that raging torrent because it's all sealed away in massive massive can certainly hear it feels like an earthquake or you can feel it underneath your feet as well that is 120 megawatts of power flowing right under our feet here it's that fantastic acceleration going from zero to Bone shaking full power that's crucial coal and nuclear power stations can take up to 30 minutes to get going but cruiken leaves them standing it takes us about two minutes to go from rest up to four Lords to get the machines on to generate but if you think of the amount of water and the force of the water that you've got to get to drive that turbine is phenomenal and you can do that on something that heavy and that massive in two minutes in two minutes can the grid need electricity that quickly sometimes so if you think about things like tea time peaks or areas of Windows really high demand my half-time uh football match we can be there we can come on really quickly to respond to that but perhaps the cleverest thing about this power station is what happens at night when we're all in bed asleep not really using much electricity there's still power on the grid this place can use that power efficiently to drive the turbines in the opposite direction effectively working as a pump pumping the water back from the locks below through the power station and up into the reservoir [Music] being able to store the energy for those times we need it the most is a really self-sufficient solution to giving us power when we need it it was surprisingly ahead of its time and it's still bailing us out of trouble every single day [Music] next I'm going deep I really gorgeous to discover a Land That Time Forgot welcome to the bone caves [Music] my next Scottish Subterranean investigation is in the Northwest Highlands I'm heading for the mysterious bone caves they lie deep down Scotland's longest cave system hidden inside Clues revealed the mighty beasts that once roamed the land above ground this is a fantastic Wilderness of steep mountains and Monumental valleys I've come here in search of a land that time forgot the highlands are never the warmest of places but compared to a few thousand years ago this is practically tropical in fact this whole landscape would have been shaped by a far colder period in Scotland's history the ice ages the secret to what happened here in the ice ages lies inside the mountains in an immense and famously challenging Cave System the grampian speleological group have been exploring these caves since the 90s Now's the Time is it Now's the Time their leader Ivan young is going to take me down Into the Depths to get to the bone caves today at the top here now it's quite hard to imagine what goes beyond what the eye can see at the moment apparently this ominous hole in the ground is the [Music] straight down huh straight down okay we're good to go yeah off you go there we go oh it's already quite tight it's actually quite far down okay Rob Follow Me Down gets a bit more complicated further in but you're okay down here amazingly this isn't a natural break in the Rock but a man-made shaft painstakingly dug out by Ivan and his team that's brilliant how far down are we here we're about 14 meters from the top 40 meters and you guys stuck all of that just about all of it though it's only a bit of air at the top before we started digging out all the muck how long did it take you to dig all this well we started digging in 95 but it wasn't until 12 years later in 2007 we actually got dogs through into dry passage it took you 12 years to dig over this cavers have long known there was a massive cave system down here but exploring them involved diving through tight water-filled sumps but those early divers had already made an amazing Discovery D in the system bows now they needed to dig this dry root in that that 12-year period was almost an investment in the future to be able to go and explore the rest of the cage much easier it's a real Adventure after my first long descent I've only scratched the surface its Network stretches on and on this is actually a lot more hardcore than I thought it would be we come on down so far down so we're next all right well I'm here through the tight spot behind through there through that crawl [Music] the next challenge lying between us and the bone caves is the toughest yet a tight passage called the skyway go on your first I'll uh I'll follow your Technique this is just an all day in the office for you oh it is yes I've been caving before but I've never been anywhere as daunting or as remote as these caves it says really tight and wet oh some of your puddles so it's like a full blown we're a two-hour drive away from Inverness and 16 miles from the nearest Village that's a little bit further on my face you know I haven't eaten down here over time there it is wow it's quite humbling really [Music] it feels like there's a lot of Rubble these Boulders so where these Boulders come from uh I don't want to try to do at all but those are falling off the roof finally we've made it to our destination in the belly of the Cave System welcome to the bone caves this is where Amazing Discoveries have been made about the beasts that once made these caves their home so what kind of Bones have you found down here then I well the most amazing set we found in the second trip that's five of us went diving and I went off in a different direction to the other four and discovered a couple of long bones from legs famous there's a female to expect that then so that's kind of human size isn't it yeah it was obvious about that but we haven't lost any members down there so we knew it wasn't that met up with the others brought them back and we found more bones and some more bones until it was obvious to most of the skeleton was there a lot of us was joking that all we need to do now is find a skull and Judd who was in the far Corner said excuse me guys behind this Boulder the bones were taken carefully all the way out through the caves and sent to the Museum of Scotland to find out exactly what they were Andrew Kitchener a specialist in prehistoric animals examined them so this is the skeleton that Ivan and his team found and as you can see it's something quite special but you couldn't believe your luck when all this came up well it was extraordinary although we did know it was underground for an awful long time 12 years from the first photographs until we actually got the whole skeleton up it's yeah totally tantalizing it was that's amazing it's so complete it's almost the whole thing little bits missing there but yeah you can see that the bones are very chunky and they're actually quite heavy to feel that yeah please thank you yeah that that is completely solid I thought that was going to be really really fragile yeah he was a big boy so if you compare that to me it's about the same size but the button itself is the muscles in that would have been massive yeah this is the skeleton of a brown bear they haven't existed in this country for at least a thousand years but when Andrew examined it he discovered this one is much much older we've had a radiocarbon dated and he was about 28 and a half thousand years old really and it's still this complete and in and in this good condition yeah 28 and a half thousand years old that means the bear was living here in a milder period during the early stage of the last ice age it's thought it came into the cave to hibernate through an old entrance and was literally caught napping ice covered the land and a rock force sealed the cave preserving the bones for thousands of years and you guys are the first people ever to set your eyes on it that's right we were yes we've just been lying there ever since it had died in the cave that's amazing brown bear down in these caves and so that was one of the reasons why we wanted to dig down and get a nice dry entrance so we could actually take the bones out the cave is had turned up one of the most important discoveries in Scottish archeology but Andrew has uncovered an even more fearsome Beast there was another bear that was found in the 1920s there which people thought was a Cave Bear to begin with and then they thought it was a brown bear but when we had it radiocarbon dated it was exactly 20 000 years old which means it was their slap bang in the middle of the last ice age so we know it was a polar bear and that was a polar bear so it's Scotland's only polar bear it's amazing to think that polar bears roamed the Scottish Highlands at the height of the last ice age and it's only now thanks to Modern radiocarbon dating that scientists have been able to prove what these creatures were and when they lived here so all of these discoveries carbon dating them allows you then to go back and start filling in pieces of this timeline as to what the climates were at different periods you had brown bears then polar bear and then brown bears again that's right so all these are pieces of a a jigsaw in in putting this bear together but then pieces in a much bigger jigsaw of that timeline yeah an environmental jigsaw you can look back in time to see how the environment changed the fight in the cave enable us to pinpoint accurately when changes occurred in this landscape and discover the fabulous creatures which roamed through the ice ages there are bound to be many more bones down here hidden away in this vast network of caves just waiting to tell their story I can see how Ivan and his boys keep coming back it's addictive and I'm kind of hooked myself coming up [Music] now I'm moving East leaving the ice ages far behind to seek out a far more recent piece of Scotland's underground history a Subterranean giant which helped Britain Triumph in World War II Inver Gordon on the chromity Firth this sheltered body of deep water has long been one of the most valuable anchorages in Britain the SE days the Firth is mainly full of cruise ships bringing tourists to the area but during the second world war this Firth would have been packed full of Warships it was a major base for the Royal Navy's Fleet [Music] I've come here to discover a highly secret installation that kept the Navy fighting at sea quietly tucked away high up on the hillside is a doorway I'm told it's the Forgotten entrance to what was one of the most hush-hush parts of Britain's defense plan archaeological investigator Alan Kilpatrick is helping me into the belly of the Beast this is it here is Alan this is the way in it's our only way in through this pipe how wide is it it's 18 inches wide 18 inches wide what's that foot and a half it's my shoulders are going to get the widest bit you'll be fine all you've got to do is get on that what do we reckon head first I would definitely see feet first you've done this I presume before so I will oh yes definitely take your advice on that four feet off the end of it absolutely and what we'll do is we'll just lift you up okay oh that's tight my shoulders are right up against it there's not much room to maneuver here even if I wanted to go somewhere my nose is so so it's totally unnerving I can't tell how long this pipe is or what I'm gonna pour out into oh this is very odd you can't see a thing but there's this stench of oil which just hits you I think the only way we're gonna get to see what this place is really like is to throw some big lights on it [Music] I hope this works light them up [Music] I'm exploring what was once a top secret part of Britain's World War II Naval defenses I hope this works light them up that's enormous the oil glistening on the floor and walls gives a clue to what this extraordinary place was for it's a vast World War II fuel tank now we've got it lit up here Alan you get a sense of scale in here it is just a vast complex and this tank it's just one of six in the complex all up in this Hillside here all on this Hillside are up to 120 meters below ground at this point each one of these tanks 237 meters long you could fit a cathedral in here and have room to spare it's a capacity of a hundred thousand tons of fuel oil it's so hard to even envisage how much oil that actually is four miles uphill from Inver Gordon the enormous tanks were built as reserves to store fuel for the warships when needed the oil would flow downhill to the ships waiting at the pier below the ships were battling to keep Britannia ruling the waves but they needed Fuel and that could only come here all the way from distant oil fields but it's coming right around South Africa up the coast of Africa through the North Atlantic around the North Coast of Scotland down through the Murray Firth and into the chromity Firth where it finally is safe to keep the Navy fighting it was absolutely vital that these tanks were protected from Attack having this oil here then I guess was absolutely critical to the success of the Allied Forces it was it was designed to be bomb proof that was the reason they had to bury the oil under the hills in structures like this to protect it from German bombing because they haven't got oil supplies you can't move your ships you can't move your ships the Island's finished Britain is finished and the war is over and the Germans probably knew these oil reserves were here this aerial photograph from the time shows huge heaps of rubble that had been removed to build the tanks but even if they suspected what was going on there was very little the Germans could do about it reinforced with walls of concrete half a meter thick not even a direct hit could touch these tanks and even more surprising is that while the Germans possibly knew the tanks were here the locals didn't have a clue you and mcvicker's father was in charge of the site during the war they knew there was something happening but what it was and who was doing it particularly what the purpose was wasn't even people around here didn't know my wife who came from the farm next door they knew there was something an inch and down but what they were doing it for was not even explained to them they could see something was going on and you find all this rock continuing the side of people working in there but what they were doing all of this it's just original 1940s stuff saved the bulbs yeah because this place has just been abandoned since yep and locked off and I'm the first time a chance to get in here to Tom brilliant because of the war this complex had to be built in just three years it was immensely difficult work with constant Danger from Rock Falls and blasts but the major killer was a silent one lots of the men in here would have died of silicosis silicosis was that inhaling inhaling the dust has come off when you're taking the rock down and turned your lungs to Stone and that killed you so I'm thankful my father came out safe and sound yeah but somehow many men wouldn't have hard hard times down here and no compensation it was such a dangerous job [Music] projects like this at home contributed massive Mass assess of Britain during World War II when it was up and running these tanks supplied millions of tons of oil to power the ships used in many major wartime campaigns [Music] this flask which is the first key carried with them throughout his work in life and as a drop-off the hard stuff and the soft stuff and I thought you and I could toast his memory in the memory of all the people who worked here to all the people who work down here thank you to all of them after all these years fuel tanks worked for decades Beyond World War II right through the Cold War and Falklands campaign they were only decommissioned in 1982. these days nearly all the oil is gone the tanks have been lying here empty and abandoned but now one man has found a rather surprising use for them Trevor Cox is a professor of acoustic engineering and he's turned in for Gordon into a field laboratory I'm going to time this Trevor yeah I think I stopped yeah yeah I was waiting for you to speak first I didn't want to ruin it so that stopped at 50 seconds I've made that wow I mean not quite your record what was your record that you got down it was 75 seconds I used a slightly bigger gun but I also measured according to a standard but yeah my recordings last for over a minute in this place in January 2014 Trevor set the world record down here for the longest ever Echo Trevor what is it about this place that makes it so special for Echoes and sound well the sand in this place just lasts a huge long time and I kind of a bit used to that in a cathedral if you're going to cry Cathedral the sound will last I know 10 seconds before dying away but this place as well as being huge like a cathedral is made out of the most massive concrete walls the half a meter thick and they were just put into the bedroom Scotland so as Sam rattles around this this place there's no there's no way for it really to go This Record was set in 1970 and lasted a mere quarter of a minute down here the echo was five times that you must be a real hero amongst sound enthusiasts around the world everyone can't quite believe it you know when you ask them to guess what the reverberation time is people come nowhere close because it's so long and I don't think it's gonna be a record quickly broken because such a big space with such massive construction it's a really unusual place to be in it's even hard to have a conversation down here because it lasts forever and ever and ever and ever and now Trevor's going to attempt something rather unusual this must be a first as well I've always wanted to play an instrument in here and I'm a saxophonist so I brought my alto sax along with me the Acoustics I'm imagining are going to be knockout what do you think this is going to sound like well it'll change across the instruments at low frequency oh no no no that's like a full forward going off into the night that goes out to the property first yeah it's going to last a long time The High Frequency the air absorbs a little bit of sound at high frequency so I tend to die away a bit quicker that top note and the thing you can do is you can build sand on top of each other so you're gonna [Music] cause I'm gonna play along with myself you got to get a whole cause you could harmonize with yourself like that but lower frequencies will last at that base yeah that bass sound will last reverberating in The Melodies I guess on top will be able to dance around on top of it who knows uh look I'm going to let you play I'm going to stand back and hand it over okay it's all yours [Music] thank you [Music] next time I'm in London exploring one of world war II's Best Kept Secrets dropping into the city's deepest ever tunnel and I'll be descending among [Music] them Britain's a small island with an extraordinary past an amazing Landscapes but what we see above ground is only half the story I'm traveling the length and breadth of our country to see it from a whole new perspective Underground I'm Rob Bell and I'm on a Subterranean Mission I'm exploring the Mysteries and wonders that lie right under our feet from man-made to natural wonders there's just so much to take in here [Applause] many are forgotten corners from the darkest points in history there's a real presence down here this is an adventure of those places beneath the surface a journey through underground Britain [Music] this time I'm in Wales exploring castles and the dark medieval secrets that lie beneath them this is one way to cancer Castle this place is so inaccessible I'm investigating the sea cave that was the site of Britain's first funeral and I'll see how deep dark slate Minds beneath snowdonia roofed the world I feel it's enormous they would have been here for their lifetime basically but first I'm heading to the Brecken beacons for an extreme Subterranean Adventure [Music] the beacons here are an absolute Haven for altitude junkies they've got one of the highest peaks in the country but for an Intrepid mole like myself the greatest natural wonders aren't up here at all they're deep and I really do mean deep underground beneath the Black Mountain lie the largest show caves in Britain giant cabins in the limestone formed 350 million years ago the Labyrinth Beyond these show caves holds one of Britain's greatest natural wonders but I've been told reaching it is an enormous challenge through freezing cold water and tight passages d Underground despite the effort it's going to take I've been assured what lies ahead will be worth it the Journey Begins here in the show caves which are deceptively easy to get into it really is quite an effect when you first walk into this cave I mean the sheer scale of it is one thing but for me it's the Wonders of Nature and the power of nature that's created all of this that leaves me in awe Danny rogoff caves have a history of intrepid exploration they were first discovered by two local Brothers Tommy and Jeff Morgan over a hundred years ago now they were two local farmers and essentially all they wanted to do was find out where the river came from the Morgan Brothers boldly explored the unknown underground Terrain they crossed four underground lakes with a small fishing boat and not knowing if they'd be able to return Venture deeper and deeper into the caves to discover a magnificent underground world I guess that's the Wonder of uh being the first people to explore this is that you've got absolutely no idea what's down there I mean if that was me I'd be I'd be petrified to do a farmers you know they weren't geologists they weren't as explorers they were farmers nobody had gone in there you know we've been brave enough nobody be stupid enough that's actually follow into the king that's some Story I mean those boys hats off because that that is real bravery being here in these Great Big Show caves near the entrance where the public can come in quite easy to be seduced by the Romanticism of that adventure and that that Intrepid spirit but I want to go deeper into the caves and really try and experience a bit more something tells me that Romanticism might just wear off a little bit the show caves are just the beginning at least 15 kilometers of known Cave System lies Beyond them hundreds of meters beneath the ground caves are marked by degrees of difficulty level five are the most severe these are level four so it's going to be a tough Journey but I've enlisted the help of expert kaver Anna sticklin to guide me in the footsteps of the Morgan brothers and Beyond tonight the first challenge is crossing an underground Lake I can certainly see why the Morgan Brothers decided to go back and get a little boom yeah the whole cave is carved out by this water that I'm struggling through over Millennia it cave Network and water's still shaping it today everything down here is formed by water even all this hair so yeah it's a slightly different process water flows through the Limestone Rock and deposits calcite leaving delicate rock formations stalactites that grow down and stalact mites which grow up it's amazing it's just kind of mesmerizing it just stare at it phrases over time as more and more calcite is deposited more rounded shapes develop still forming that you see the little water droplets just on the end and then dripping down also making it grow up so that is both really really old and really really fresh [Music] foreign the deeper I Venture into these caves the more respect I have for the Morgan Brothers they were exploring unknown depths and doing it all by candlelight there it is right here you go that's the difference I can now with this see maybe a meter maybe maybe a meat and a half ahead of me that makes such a difference if I had to continue the rest of my exploration of the cave like this I'd be really really scared it's quite eerie [Music] and I will not be using that it's believed that the Plucky Morgan Brothers got just beyond the Lakes before their progress was halted by a tiny passage almost half a kilometer in but I'm going to venture further only ahead Anna tells me there are amazing natural wonders but first it's the greatest challenge yet [Music] I'm in Wales exploring the largest show caves in Britain and what lies Beyond in the wonders of Danny rogoff beneath the Black Mountain in the depths of this underground Labyrinth is the greatest natural wonder the cloud chamber but first is the challenge of getting there almost half a kilometer in we've reached a tiny passageway it's believed the first explorers the Morgan Brothers stopped here I'm going down there all right that's up online yeah okay oh okay let's say it's slowly matured I'm good we're out part way through the crawl we've emerged in a small chamber that's particularly significant cavers after the Morgan Brothers got this far but ventured no further until the 1960s then a tiny inexperienced caver Eileen Davis a teacher from Swansea managed to push through and conquer the next section known as the long crawl as long as it's a head game um it feels unnatural for you to try and force your body through something that's quite tight yeah like not knowing what's on the other side or not know if you can turn around or Retreat if you need to so Terry first went through and purely because you can feel this draft coming through so you know there's something big on the other side but you've got to go through this a little bit okay okay so you're getting an airflow through here because there's a large chamber or something indication there's something all right okay it is worth it I promise ah I'm struggling to put myself in the frame of mind of Eileen and how she could just push through Anna's right this is a battle inside your head subscribing all these tiny little holes I've got a 90 degree Bend to negotiate you as well good think about this it's such a challenge willing my body through this tight space and it's getting tighter you've got to make yourself a small possum sneak your way through okay very hard to show your perspective here but that very very narrow was that one it's about 200 two and a half hours [Music] [Music] okay well done so can we now confirm this is the end of the long course this is the proper end now yeah yeah you'll soon see that it was all worth it [Music] after an exhausting journey of almost a kilometer through this Cave System my goal the cloud chamber lies just around the corner okay all right this feels a little bit special coming up here [Music] ah it's amazing there's hundreds and thousands of them suddenly this is your world rather than the world you're looking up at [Music] this is the surprise at the end of the tunnel I'm so pleased you brought me all the way through here it's a really special place isn't it I've never seen anything like this before in my life I can just sit here for a while and take it all in deep in the cloud chamber the limestone is denser and harder filtering impurities in the water creating these beautiful straw-like stalactites [Music] well thank you so much for bringing me up here obviously I would not have been able to get here on my own I'm so pleased I made it all the way it was tough but I'm really really pleased thank you I started off today inspired by the story of the Morgan brothers and then Eileen the fact that it was pure curiosity that drove him down here in the first place just to see what was here and all the way along I've been thinking to myself if that was me in their shoes would I have kept pushing on but when you get into a space like this the cloud chamber you can start to understand why they would come down here that pursuit of something that no one's ever seen before you know sometimes you don't have to travel to the corners of the earth to find the world's natural beauty sometimes it's right beneath your feet that said there's only one way back out of here that's the way I came next Quest takes me close to the English border to riffen Castle Wales is known as the land of castles home to some of Britain's greatest medieval fortresses they Tower over the landscape but what interests me are the mysterious tunnels and Chambers beneath them and the medieval secrets that they hide [Music] over 730 years ago English king Edward the first was battling the Welsh in order to do this he built castles all over Wales [Music] riffen Castle was one of the first to be built there's not much of the medieval castle left above ground and what was standing here three quarters of a millennium ago when written Was A Mighty Fortress remains a bit of a mystery but hidden underground there are far more clues to what was here before [Music] there's one passage on a map that we've never actually been into it learns the whole length of the courtyard Will Davis of kadu tells me no one's been here for over a quarter of a century first there's this strange little entrance this is one way to cancer Castle it's all about secret messages Flopper exploration ice goes on and on and on hello something here an opening above gives us our first clue about what this passage is all these big Edwardian castles their palaces effectively with fortifications they've got Plumbing so you've got to visit any of the others they've got rain water being collected on rooftops guided down through channels suited to these great big drains and the whole above our heads up here which is blocked later on I would guess probably brought water down either from a guard or the two Shaft or maybe just from the surface to help wash this out a Gada robe was a medieval toilet I'm not even gonna think about if this was a dream what might have made its way down here and been no gushing through all this given its purpose as the Castle's main sewer it's an impressive tunnel but there's a second underground mystery to investigate that seems more promising look at this this is fantastic little Archway down here if you look back up we're looking at Courtyard level at the top of these steps yeah into what's no problem the abasement although now open to the elements these steps would have led down into a dark chamber underneath the castle if you look here what is this here this massive hole in the wall it's a big hole it's it's what's called a draw bar hole a large piece of Timber would have been drawn from this hole across the door to bolt it firmly shut it doesn't feel like I'm anywhere near the end that goes right back so there might have been a reason that they would have wanted to shut off either this passage or what was in yeah whether that's for defensive purpose you've got enemies on the other side or they're up in the courtyard or perhaps you're keeping something in here that you don't want people getting at now we're talking yeah so here the bar would have been on the outside of the chamber door locking something or someone inside [Music] but what secrets were locked behind this door hanger it opens up what's what's this here [Music] what you have is a chamber that you can't just walk into it's below ground level which brings us to the question of what is it [Music] could be a store but that's not very convenient you've got to get down on a ladder why not just at ground level it's a big castle you can fit one in some sort of water supply or system but again where does the water come in where does the water go out again or you could say it could well be somewhere you would throw somebody they can't get out of too easily and it's the closest I think we have to a dungeon foreign the remains of a medieval dungeon but to uncover what it was like being imprisoned in one I'm heading to nearby Church Castle another of Edward the First's border strongholds this looks a lot more promising and if it's that impressive above ground it must have what I'm after down below King Edward the first wanted to keep the Welsh population firmly under control so he appointed his most ruthless Lords to construct and run his castles in these Borderlands foreign Mortimer to jerk who built this castle and had a particularly fearsome reputation this Castle is 719 years old this year it's been constant movement constant flux building alteration all the same it's lived in are we going down that's right come on this is what I'm after this is to our first dungeon but what lies at the bottom of the stairs isn't quite what I was expecting all right then so this is a dungeon though is it here this is where you'd have people imprisoned yes well a particular sort of prisoner well it looks a bit cozy for me this is a fireplace area there yeah that's what I mean only wealthy powerful enemies would have been held in here hostages rather than prisoners their High status ensuring they had a more comfortable stay they'd have had the run of the castle during the day but here they would have kept themselves warm and quite Pleasant at night but it wasn't just Welsh Gentry folk who were held here as hostages in this very room we believe that seven French prisoners who'd been taken prisoner at Asian core were actually transported from here to London they were simply taken off the battlefield kept as valuable items to be swapped at a later date but not all the prisoners here received the noble treatment Roger Mortimer de chirk was Infamous for his harsher punishments now it said that in the early days of his living year a priest came up from the village of jerk to reminstrate with Roger Mortimer about his licentious and debauched ways now what happened to the priest was quite singular apparently so The Story Goes he was thrown into the lower dungeon beneath us at this moment and after two days he was tied to his horse the horse was smacked and he was sent down to church again nobody messed with Roger Mortimer you mentioned a lower dungeon beneath our feet oh yes would you like to see it I definitely would yes he follow me deep in the lower dungeon is where things turned really nasty [Music] I'm at church Castle on the Welsh borders exploring the underground tunnels and Chambers full of dark Mysteries and dungeons I'm being led to the depths of the lower dungeon to find out the horrors of medieval punishment foreign meters below the ground now the only source of light and ventilation comes from Tiny shafts high up in the thick castle walls so at the time you really were the whim of of Mortimer or the Lord who may have succeeded him absolutely his word was law when the story of the priest I guess in some senses he was lucky in that he got out alive whereas perhaps others weren't quite as lucky and their FA ended here absolutely and the brutality continued long after Roger Mortimer of course the castle went on having its dungeone news way into the 16th century in 1522 the Constable of the tower then sent out to pay eight prints for new iron for the rivets for the bolts for the prisoners so not just locked away down here chained up as well you think yes anyway everything in these walls goodness me what a horrific horrific end these dungeons really are chilling places being alone in one it doesn't take long to grasp the misery of dungeon life and that's even with the luxury of a candle something most prisoners wouldn't have had it really is quite horrible down here you feel completely cut off from the outside world it's eerily quiet it's cold it's damp and it's very very dark next my underground exploration takes me South to the Gower Peninsula and the cliff with an extraordinary prehistoric story to tell a weird ancient burial known as the red Lady of pavaland [Music] it's not going back really now anyways now there we go this time I'm headed down to a unique archaeological site at the bottom of pavaland cliff oh wow unless there's an exceptionally low tide this is the only way to access it I'm going to investigate a remarkable Stone Age burial that was Unearthed in goat's hole cave oh this place is hard to get to isn't it just a little bit it's worth it though that's fantastic that is brilliant so much fun nice to meet you very good so the cave is just here this is go tall cave a cliff you're on is paviland local Adventurer Andrew price is guiding me round the caves if you follow me this way it's formed of Carboniferous Limestone which is about 350 million years old Carboniferous limestone is water soluble so water coming through small fishes in the Rock opens it out so the cave that we're in was at one time an underground cave system wow and it was just the the action of an Ice Age glaciers just basically chewed the front off this cave and exposed it to the elements Gower has probably hundreds of miles of cave system some of them have been explored lots of them haven't so this is just one part but this one's special because almost 200 years ago a mysterious human skeleton known as the red Lady of pavaland was found what I want you to imagine is is free this cave wasn't open like this it was actually full of all sorts of rock and Earth and debris up to about two-thirds of the height so it was dug and as they were digging down probably to about this level here this is where the bones were found who was digging all this out it was a gentleman called Reverend William Buckland who was the dean of Oxford University geology Department William Buckland was later to become the dean of Westminster Abbey and was a devout Christian so then what exactly did he find he found an almost complete human skeleton wow at pretty much this level missing the skull but most of the other body parts were there okay now the bones had been stained bright red and interestingly they were also found with things like drill Periwinkle shells pieces of Ivory and a complete Mammoth skull a mama skull I'm a skull Buckland drew a sketch of his findings showing where he found the bones in the cave but the combination of human and Mammoth together gave Buckland a problem [Music] Buckland was thrown into something of a quandary as a creationist he couldn't understand how human bones could be found alongside bones that were supposedly of creatures that only existed prior to the great flood Buckland believed that the world was made by God exactly as described in the Bible and that the Earth was just six thousand years old through all his uh religious beliefs into disarray and to to balance that he came up with the notion that the mammoth skull and Mammoth bones and things like that had been washed in here separately and they'd all become mixed together at a different time yes yeah the human skeleton created a further challenge it had been carefully buried with special objects and some of the bones were colored red so he assumed that the bones were those of a woman first of all based on the fact that they found the Periwinkle shells which had been drilled into a form of necklace and no upstanding Victorian gentleman would ever wear jewelry so he thought it was either a prostitute or a witch why did button just assume that she was a prostitute well some people say it's because the bones were stained red that she was somehow a Scarlet woman but as it turned out the bones were far more interesting than that buckler never knew this though but first I want to know why would our ancient ancestors have chosen a burial site that's so difficult to access Elizabeth Walker from the national museum Wales is showing me the cave from a different perspective she's brought me here to enlighten me on what it would have looked like in the early Stone Age when the burial took place this would have been a very different landscape who wouldn't be bobbing around on the sea as we are today we'd be in a big open plane full of grassland now it's the Bristol Channel was that that's North Devon coach that's right yes so between here and there you've been able to walk probably being able to walk the sea level would have been 250 feet lower meaning the coastline would have been miles away from the cave so what does that mean for the cave here back then would it have been up high yes you'd have had a hill to climb to get up to that cave but that cave itself would have been an ideal vantage point for these hunter-gatherers if you imagine that this grassland is full of big mammals like mammoths woolly rhinoceroses and Wild Horse those would have provided them with their source of food as well Elizabeth's taken me to Swansea Museum to uncover the real red Lady of pavaland and there are a few surprises in store [Music] these are exact replicas of the bones found in the caves and shockingly they reveal that buckland's red Lady of pavaland isn't a lady at all She's a Man so is it actually quite obvious that these bones were from a man and not a woman as much in its head yes indeed because we can tell from the pelvis okay a male pelvis has quite a tight Notch here whereas the female it's much wider that's immediately obvious to anybody who in the nose it it is yes that's right so it's remarkable that um Buckland didn't actually recognize this when he was creating the female stories he came up with wow so then what about the red coloring of the bones well the red coloring comes from Red ocher red ocher is a natural pigment containing hydrated iron oxide often found with ancient burials so the staining had nothing to do with witchcraft as Buckland thought what is unusual I think about this particular one is that it's the bones that have stained red rather than just a pile of ocher being placed beneath the skeleton it might have been used as a preservative in some clothing that the skeleton might have been buried in a garment placed on his legs at his funeral could account for the greater staining found on the lower part of the skeleton so that seems to me like quite a formal burial then you've certainly was buried in a very formal way with the skeleton they were specially placed grave Goods including these Periwinkle shells so it could have been someone with a fair amount of status that's possible yeah certainly somebody with um who required this um this very rich burial in a cave radiocarbon dating carried out in 2007 actually shows the Red Man of pavaland died 29 000 years ago it was found with the mammoth head as well so is that consistent that that Mammoth would have been around that time as well that's right yes and we believe in fact that the mammoth skull was actually placed in the grave not washed in separately as Buckland thought for Britain this is the oldest formal burial of a modern human just like ourselves that we know of so Buckland actually found something really really special yes he did Buckland may have got many of the facts wrong and the story may not be as colorful as a red witch or prostitute but his Discovery is still the oldest known ceremonial burial ever found in Great Britain yeah my Subterranean Adventure next takes me to the mountains of snowdonia and underground wealth that transformed the Region's fortunes I'm on a mission to find out how the mining in this Valley around brine Alpha stiniog roofed the world from London to Australia and how it brought both wealth and hardship to the local community so this is the entrance down into the Quarry that the miners themselves would have taken it's quite comfy for me here in the train but uh back then when they were working they would have to walk down here I'm descending 120 meters to liquid slate Caverns they opened in 1836 and at their height were one of the biggest slate Minds in the world during the 1890s the Welsh slate industry produced a third of all the world's slate it was transported all over the British Empire to North America and India it even went to Germany their biggest customer it transformed the economy of the whole of Wales but how did they manage to mine such vast quantities of Slate from Deep beneath these unyielding mountains [Music] Phil Jones's family mined in these Caverns for Generations it feels like these tunnels just go on and on and on well they do go on for 25 miles altogether 25 miles that's almost a marathon's worth yeah there's a marathon's worth of tunneling Network down here yeah these minds are huge measuring 600 meters from top to bottom with 16 levels and 250 Chambers where the men extracted the Slate incredibly this vast man-made Warren was entirely dug and blasted by hand it's enormous it is isn't it something like this should take him around 20 years to dig out all the fleet they would have been here for their lifetime basically and all by candlelight as well so he never even got to see how impressive this is after 20 years your life's work yeah this whole chamber was dug out by just two people who spent their entire working life in one place this is uh this is what they would have used their hand drill this is called a jumper and all it is it's a steel rod with two chiseled ends and a ten pound weight at the bottom that would be called the clap because of the noise that I made when it hit the rock surface and all they would do is just start to haul off just drill and give it a Twist as they're going along and once they got to around two inches they'd blow the candle out because candles cost money in those days so then they'd be working in darkness in the darkness just chasing away like you were there yeah just going like this the miners would drill into the run of the Slate to create a hole and fill it with gunpowder they used makeshift fuses which were extremely unreliable they could take ages to burn or just go off in their hand that would blow off a big chunk of sleep big chunk yeah three tons is the biggest that you could take out any more than that's too heavy basically they chop them down to size down here and then they hold them up to their surface I'll be finding out how they transform the blocks of slate into valuable Commodities that change the face of this small Welsh Valley [Music] I'm in Bligh now for stinio on a mission to find out how the mining in this small Welsh Valley roofed the world here at the cleckwed Slate Caverns large blocks of slate mined below ground were skillfully transformed into highly profitable commodities split and slate you always go in the middle all right okay never to the side I'll just chip away so you go all the way to the middle [Music] right you got crack straight oh it's gone right through straight away yep wow it's going down The Natural end of the Slate but for every ton there was about 10 tons of waste due to the Natural faults of the Stone but if the Slate was of high quality each person could create 500 roofing tiles a day okay and the Slate Cutters were paid per slate what they did was um they did 100 slate but in actual they had to do 133 the other 33 was going to the company like insurance if any of them broke now it's my turn to finish it off so this will be the final cut now yeah right to be sold as a roofing slate it had to be split to an eighth of an inch oh so it feels like it's fragile but if you get it in the right place it's all good that's lovely yep that's usable you reckon you could sell that yeah it's not as easy as it might look uh there's a lot of precision there and you never know what's going to be inside this lady the business was so successful that this Railway was built in the 1830s to transport the huge quantities of slate to the harbor of portmaddock down the valley over 13 miles away so they're on average how often would this would the train be doing the journey between the port and the quarries at the height of the railways Prosperity you'd have had two down trains and slate each day and they might have been carrying as much as 200 tons so imagine each one of those as carrying enough slate to roof about 75 Terrace houses wow the Slate was taken to the port to be transported all over the world the town of portmadog didn't exist before the Slate industry and the Very fact it was created is Testament to the success of the Slate mines I suppose you could say the benefits of the Railway spread all the way down the valley because whereas Christian York was home to the Sweet qualityman both Mad Dog would have been home to the Sea captains and the Mariners so really you could say this is a like a not a Boom Town it was a Boom Valley in the 19th century in its prime it was a world leader in the Slate industry however by 1914 Britain had gone to war with Germany the biggest market for Welsh slate disappeared overnight the Great Depression and manufactured tiles hit demand for natural slate and by the 1970s the mines were a shadow of what they were but even during the boom years the harsh reality of mining took its toll on the men below ground one of their biggest dangers and one of their biggest enemies would have been the darkness in Welsh it's called The Skin drostadiven and that is falling over the Deep so you could be falling from one level down to the other and that's a 70-foot drop straight down off the edge do that so then you you're not going to tell the tale and there were other dangers that were just as concealed the old man used to say it's not the dust you can see that's dangerous it's the dust that you can't you get a disease called silicosis and that's the dust going on to your lungs sitting like concrete and then you can't breathe so by the time you would be 35 you'd be thinking about retiring in the Victorian times and by the time you were 40 between 40 and 50 you'd be passed away Phil's father and grandfather were some of the last miners to work here in the 1970s extracting Slate from this very Cavern my grandfather he had an accident he went back to the blast and the blast went off prematurely and so he lost the use of his hand and I remember blue freckles up his arm whereas where the Slate had embedded into his arm and did he ever come back down there I don't think he did after that no but he wasn't the same after that really as soon as you come down here it's impossible not to be hugely impressed by the engineering achievement of this place and it's clear that the rich is contained within this mine transform the economy of the area and of all of Wales but at what cost having heard all the stories and even seen up close the tool marks in the side of the caverns it's impossible still for me to put myself in the shoes of the men who sometimes spent most of their lives down here next time I'm traveling to the center of underground England to explore a den of iniquity in buckinghamshire it's kinky isn't it fight fires with underground Rescuers and unravel Nottingham's medieval murder mystery Britain's a small island with an extraordinary past and amazing landscapes but what we see above ground is only half the story traveling the length and breadth of our country to see it from a whole new perspective Underground I'm Rob Bell and I'm on a Subterranean Mission I'm exploring the Mysteries and wonders that lie right under our feet from man-made to natural wonders this is so much to take in many are forgotten corners from the darkest points in history there's a real presence down here this is an adventure of those places beneath the surface a journey through underground Britain [Music] this time my Expedition underground takes me to Central England I'll go deep into long-lost stone age mines really they just come straight down head down work with the men who prepare for life and death underground rescues and I'll be investigating murky rumors of a secret society deep under buckinghamshire it's kinky but first I've come to the city of Nottingham on the trail of a bloody medieval mystery the connections to the legend of Robin Hood and the ruins of the sheriff's Castle are part of Nottingham's claim to fame but what's less well known is that underneath these streets lies the largest underground network of man-made caves anywhere in Britain I've come to explore this underground Warren to discover what it reveals about Nottingham's medieval past and I'll be exploring a recently discovered tunnel that's transformed what we know about a bloody moment in our history caves have existed here for as long as Nottingham itself the earliest written record is over a thousand years old when a Welsh monk referred to the settlement as tigua kobach meaning place of caves the city stands on soft Sandstone that's easy to tunnel more than 500 caves have been discovered beneath these streets to wet my appetite for medieval underground Nottingham I've come to a nightclub complete with a hidden cave [Music] whoa there it is there's medieval Nottingham this is nuts this is great isn't it that's you'd have absolutely no idea would you when you come in through the nightclub doors my guide is archaeologist Dr David strange Walker he's on a mission to survey and understand all of Nottingham's hundreds of underground caves this is a this is a molting which is a set of Chambers for turning barley into malt as part of the Brewing process this is an intact medieval Factory just sort of sitting beneath his 19th century building people started you know cutting these Sandstone caves some for very very kind of useful reasons mostly it's just because it's an easy way to create more space so you can you know you can easily Dig Down have yourself a seller David and his team are using state-of-the-art Laser Technology to scan and survey every cave they find it enables them to create a detailed 3D model of this hidden Subterranean Network and explore every nook and cranny [Music] it's helped them on Earth scores more caves than were previously known [Music] at the heart of the city is a large Sandstone Mound full of caves inside it runs a mysterious tunnel that stretches from the base of the Sandstone Rock to the site of Nottingham Castle High Above it's at the core of a medieval mystery a story of adultery treason and execution [Music] everyone in Nottingham knows this as the entrance to mortimer's hole it leads to a tunnel that's Infamous for the role Legend says it played in a notorious moment in Royal history it's over a hundred meters long named after Roger de Mortimer a powerful nobleman who was supposedly kidnapped along this tunnel in a daring secret raid on the 19th of October 1330 under the cover of darkness two dozen men are said to have scaled these steps towards the castle they knew that if caught they'd be far outnumbered ten to one so the element of surprise was vital their goal to capture the man who deposed King Edward II and who ruled England for the past three years sir Roger de Mortimer foreign ER was the lover of Queen Isabella she was the mother of the teenage King Edward III Edward III was young that's right he was he was only about 15 and so he was very easy to manipulate also they thought unfortunately as he grew he grew in power he grew in status and he wanted some of that power back from Mortimer by the time he was heading towards his 18th birthday there were rumors that the queen was pregnant and so he didn't want mortimer's child to be able to take his place as potentially King so it was a concerned 18 year old he took action there Isabella and Mortimer started to fear for their lives and so they came here to Nottingham Castle it had only ever fallen Siege once and so they felt really really safe here but these tunnels were a vulnerability a tunnel was the only way Edward's men could sneak into the heavily fortified Castle Edward III's men were down in the town they'd all been called to court and and Edward III actually managed to get hold of the keys for the castle unbeknownst to his mother while Edward lodged in the town he sent a group of his men who got into the castle through the [Music] news they crept up these tunnels up to the the Royal Chambers a couple of the guards were were killed when the the men burst into the chamber Isabella threw herself and her son's Mercy begging for for Mercy for the for the gentle Mortimer they grabbed Roger Mortimer dragged him down through the tunnels they tied him to the back of a cart and they dragged him all the way to London and once he was in London Roger de Mortimer was executed I love the idea of Edward III's men storming this tunnel to surprise Mortimer and this was a hugely significant event in our history Edward III went on to become a revered and respected King who restored the authority of the English Monarchy and transformed the kingdom of England into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe he reigned for 50 years and there's absolutely no doubt that this story happened but recent developments have cast a bit of a Shadow of Doubt as to whether this tunnel is the true mortimer's whole but if this isn't the true tunnel then where is the real mortimer's hole this mystery is underground outside the castle walls in a surprising place okay look at that [Music] I'm exploring a gruesome medieval mystery in Nottingham's Infamous mortimer's whole but there's doubt whether this is the true scene of that Bloody kidnap nearly 700 years ago [Music] now Dr David strange Walker believes fresh evidence reveals where it really happened this is Mr Brian Lee's owns the house welcome thank you very much this is fantastic the vital clue lies below ground some distance from the castle in a normal Back Garden one day when we were having this repaved our Builder hit some concrete with a pickaxe and the whole thing just caved in and he nearly fell in with it he jumped down we went after him and there it was a little bit of history in the garden can't be bad can we have a look yes of course yes be my guest I'm so excited to see what's down there thank you look at that there we go there you go I think you should go first Rob really I think so yes yeah can you tell us the truth guess first eh absolutely there's a dignified way to get down I need this that's quite dark in history [Music] David this is nuts ah it's a tight crawl into a narrow tunnel that at first seems to lead nowhere this is uh this is stable is it because this is all loose Sandstone isn't it yeah this is this is fantastic the the filler I mean the fill on the ground is a bit loose but the rock itself is going to be absolutely fine these uh caves are not in they don't they don't collapse unless you do something extraordinary it's like climbing a mountain oh oh it's getting a bit a bit taller up here yeah it does some the film drops away a bit and it starts to get to kind of standing height brilliant and this is all in Brian's backyard yeah this long lost tunnel that begins modestly under a patio opens up into an impressive Passage at some point people knew about this and then they didn't yeah yeah well we think they put a new Carriage Road into the castle in the 19th century about the same time that Brian's house was built and that was probably the moment that to the far end of it the castle end of it was blocked when all this fill came in and then at that point it becomes forgotten about but this again I mean this is this is a Nottingham cave stories is you find this quite often that people know about caves and know about caves and then they get closed off and within a generation two generations before they're gone you know they're lost entirely and so that's why Brian could live here for 20 years and not not know that this fantastic cave is here that's amazing every step is bringing us closer to the castle wall it's a really quite clearly marked our steps here yeah that's right yeah the um the fill drops away and you can see yeah rock cut steps and then about 10 meters Beyond where you are you can see where it's blocked at the back end there so right at the back here that's right yes yeah well that's as far as we can go but that would be your way into the castle [Music] um from our surveys it suggests that we're about underneath the the Modern Edge of the castle so the modern castle wall David's Explorations point to this being the real mortimer's whole it seems to be backed up by ancient documents there's a British library Highland manuscript which is a thing of beauty and is written in Latin this first account states that the passage used by the kidnappers was a secret tunnel unknown to Roger de Mortimer and Queen Isabella he noted this as being a a secret tunnel that was unknown to Mortimer and to Isabella and he also says that Isabella was so worried about about something happening that she made sure she kept all the keys to the castle at night so she had the keys to everything that she knew about everything that she knew about except for a properly secret talk uh here's the upper Bailey the keep so this is where the Royal Apartments were when Isabella and Mortimer stayed here so they'd have been up here okay and then slap bang in the middle of it there's the top and the one that we now know as mortimer's hole it's not sort of secretly tucked away in a corner or something it's quite clearly indicated so they must have known about it there's further evidence that supports the theory that the real tunnel used by the soldiers is the one that starts in Brian's Garden and his troops went in a post and open towards the park during the night but Boston is like a secret entrance or a little back entrance into a castle and open to the park is that way is the way we've came so Brian's house is just on the edge of the park and it's their old Royal Hunting Park so that's the park whereas mortimer's hole that's down that's down over that way they all seem to be suggesting a tunnel that heads Westwoods to the park and is secret and is not known about by anybody who would be in the castle that's amazing isn't it and then it's just that kind of you know fairly quiet until until Brian found it again 10 years ago such a great story and it's so and it's such a new story yet from centuries ago absolutely yes the discussion as to which is the true mortimer's hole is bound to continue but I have to say the evidence that suggests this tunnel was where Mortimer was dragged through by Edward III's men is pretty compelling but what absolutely staggers me is that this place that was lost for so long and then found again in someone's back Garden is so critical to English History next on my underground Odyssey I'm traveling East to Norfolk to discover why Stone Age man dug deep into the underworld [Music] at first glance there doesn't appear to be anything remarkable about this place it's just another grassy field like any other but look at it from a different perspective and you reveal an amazing landscape from the air a bizarre grass-covered lunar landscape is revealed [Music] this amazing moonscape is in fact evidence of some of the oldest mining activity in Britain each of these depressions is the surface scar of a stone age mine shaft dug over 5 000 years ago in the hunt for this stuff Flint [Music] this enigmatic terrain remained a mystery until almost 150 years ago when archaeologists made the huge discovery of some of Britain's very first industry they Unearthed the vast area of nearly a hundred acres with more than a thousand Flint mines all dug by Stone Age miners in the Neolithic era 5 000 years ago [Music] the miners were going where nobody in Britain had gone before deep into the Earth I want to understand why they went to such depth in search of this stuff Dr Miles Russell is taking me to Greenwell shaft it's normally locked from public View [Music] look at that the entrance to the shaft is modern but the Mind below is very ancient at 12 meters deep and 6 meters across it's incredible to think this was dug by hand using tools made of antler and Bone [Music] you really do just come straight down you see all the Flint these little seams in there it's amazing isn't it it's not at all I expected this is the first time that human beings are really altering the Earth in previous areas they've been going down to Natural fishes natural caves and modifying those in some way but here they're actually digging down into the ground they're actually creating their own space coming down here for them it probably would have been the most sort of mind-blowing experience ever you're going out into the unknown you don't know what's down here you don't know whether you're going to come out alive it would have been a completely unsettling experience it's hard to imagine what it must have been like for these Stone Age miners who are digging deep into the ground for the first time it is literally all inspiring isn't it when you think this is uh it's all been dug out of the solid chalk by people using antler and Bone tools and you think of it something like this would have taken what 30 people anything up to about three months to to carve this out of the chalk this is huge I mean it's it's much bigger than I thought this is one of the biggest underground spaces that lead up to the to the ground that I think I've ever seen this would have looked really quite different and could have then looked something like a construction site now with things going up and down and yeah yeah scaffolding and absolutely no concept of health and safety so it had been extremely dangerous place to work undoubtedly as well you can see this kind of ring of Flint around us here yes they they've cut through three of these horizontal cements and you can see right the way down at the bottom down here it's almost solid layer of Flint that's the one they wanted to get down to it's one of those odd things because there's so much Flint on the surface it's so much Flint around here um it's it's a readily available resource and yet they they dug this deliberately to get down to this layer and and dig it out so why did they go to so much effort to get their Flint I'm meeting someone who knows all about the value of this special stone and the Art of shaping it known as napping so what was Flint so important to Neolithic people it's the only real raw material in this area we have to give a good sharp edge John Lord has dedicated years to understanding flint and is napping the same type that you'd find at Grimes Graves that is lethally sharp isn't it it is you could really slice your skin with that wall this is leather this is pretty tough bit of hide here wow that's impressive before the introduction of metal technology most tools were made from this hard durable Stone from axes to arrowheads it was the key material of the Stone Age but back underground there's evidence to suggest there's more to mining than just seeking out high quality Flint once the miners had dug to the prized third layer of flint in the main shaft they stopped going downwards and started tunneling sideways it really is quite crowd down here once it is it is very restricted space down here in the depths There's an opportunity to make an amazing connection with the miners who worked here 5 000 years ago okay if you crawl down to the end of this particular gallery now what we're looking at here these are the actual antler picks that they use when they're working down here really there's very few examples I think in certainly British archeology where you can you can touch the past so physically handling the antler picks that the Stone Age miners actually used it feels as if they down tools yesterday and to think that this has just been untouched for the last five thousand years yeah these are the original ones these haven't seen the live day for 5 000 years they've been left at the end of The Gallery at the end of the the digging phase perhaps there's an offering perhaps as a as a thank you gift to whatever gods and date is they believed in to think nearly everything we know archaeologically the pyramids most of Stonehenge the civilizations of Greece Rome and Persia all these happened after these tools were set down here for the Neolithic people mining wasn't just about getting Flint it was also a religious and spiritual experience none of the reassuring sights and smells and sounds of the surface are down here it's really sort of perhaps a shift in in Consciousness they're moving away from The Real World they're into this sort of nether realm uh the World perhaps of spirits of underground deities being at such depths in a new world must have been an incredible and dangerous experience not for the faint-hearted the only archaeological evidence that we've got for people who've died apparently during the mining process comes from Sussex and they're both two young females who are working down there there I think May well be good evidence to suggest that it's not the mature members of society down here it is the immature it is the younger people the thought of children working in modern Minds is shocking but in Neolithic times it was part of growing up there is a sense of having important Rites of Passage and I think perhaps if you combine the restricted space of these galleries with the unsettling experience it may be part of that movement from childhood to adulthood oh really it's part of part of the way of proving themselves that they they're brave enough they're adventurous enough exactly I mean if they would come out onto the surface almost a sense of being reborn and you're coming out plastered from head to foot in chalk so you're you you look very different when you come emerge and with that Flint in hand you may well then have passed or deemed to have passed into being an adult foreign [Music] the hardship and effort involved in Stone Age mining that flint and bringing it back up to the surface is part of the value associated with that end product that they got that Flint that they can turn into tools but I guess for me it's a little bit like crossing the Finish Line at the end of a marathon it's because of the hardship it's because of the challenge and the effort you've put in that makes it all feel so special and that I can understand next I'll be fast forwarding 5 000 years to Modern minds and I'll be working with the men who prepare for life and death situations Underground [Music] I'm on an underground Adventure across the center of England now I'm traveling to Mansfield to work with the men who go underground when the going gets really tough underground Rescuers mining has played a key part in British history since Stone Age Flint mines but from Neolithic to Modern mining it's always been incredibly dangerous work one of Britain's worst Pit disasters happened in South Wales in 1913. 439 people died at sengenith but many more could have perished if it wasn't for the courage and skill of the mine Rescuers imagine being stuck underground wondering if you're gonna get out alive your life could depend on the modern rescue teams based here I'm going to discover how the mine rescue service still prepare for the very worst what a main workers these are our comrades these are our friends we're going to rescue our friends the people that we work with and the end result of that might not be the happy ending we want but that's why we train our people and that's why we have the equipment we've got it is a direct focus on saving Mine Workers lives right beneath the center there's a warrant of tunnels especially designed to simulate the conditions they might face on a real Rescue Mission they can set fires fill the tunnels with smoke and even change their layout to set up different disaster scenarios it's all designed to replicate real life and death situations before I can take part I need to get kitted out put your nose and mouth inside the into our nasal piece pull the top one which is a bit of an air pincher yep I scream you know why if you take this set off on the environment you're going to be working in or you're going to be carrying out these rescues there's no second chance it's going to kill you so you've got a you're going to be relying on that okay all right yep oh wow there is ah it's time to enter the mine Simulator for a full-on rescue drill thank you all right gents this is the situation we've got a mango missing this morning we do believe that there's a fall of ground at some point we're not 100 sure yet the search feels very real and very challenging with dark close conditions Underground takes seconds before you are gonna be tough all right head down let's go it's down how's this we got we got a roof come down is that yeah a few minutes in we've discovered where the roof has collapsed to reach the casualty we need to unblock the tunnel as quickly as possible half a percentage the rush of information about explosive and poisonous gases that's being shouted is pretty overwhelming for a beginner like me to stabilize the tunnel we're making a supporting structure from wood unlike other materials wood creaks before breaking [Music] it's a crucial signal so we've got time to get out before the roof collapses [Music] I'll tell you there's absolutely no time for mucking about that here it feels very very real that there is urgency behind all of that that's really hard further into the tunnel we Face our next obstacle even though I'm with a team of experts on a training exercise being faced with a real underground fire it's pretty unnerving using water to put a fire out on the ground is dangerous as the heat can produce hydrogen and that can explode in this case I'm using dry powder [Music] there's a smoke here you lost quite a bit the job is not that it's far from that okay we found the casualty once he's secure I can put the oxygen around Viber on him question may not give him about half an hour of breathing so time really is ticking keep an eye on that as well it's probably one of the toughest things I reckon it's going to be getting this back out through the tunnels around the corners come back up the truck [Music] oh foreign [Applause] the final part of the mission is complete as we bring the casualty back up above ground that was so much harder than I thought it would be and that's in a really controlled environment when you don't know really what's going to be happening you don't know that you're going to be safe it could be real fires explosions rock falls and really conditions that are a lot hotter and a lot more humid I've had it quite easier today but there was nothing about that that was easy my last Subterranean exploration takes me to buckinghamshire and back over 250 years in search of a rumored den of underground debauchery West Wickham 5 000 Acres of beautifully landscaped Countryside and home to the dashwood family for more than 300 years it's the picture perfect country estate [Music] look at that that is about as respectable a view of the great English Countryside you'd ever wish to see green Rolling Hills distant town and a Staley home but right beneath my feet there's a secret that reveals a whole different story this Hillside is riddled with caves that tell a tale that would make polite Society shudder 300 years ago all of this was home to the founder of a secret society rumored to engage in drunken orgies and dark Satanic rituals the society became known as the infamous hellfire club it's a story packed full of rumor the difficulty is knowing what facts and what's fiction I'm going to try and find out exactly what went on in the Hellfire caves the leader of this shadowy group that built the caves was an MP a magistrate and later even Chancellor of the exchequer his name was Sir Francis dashwood a prominent member of the 18th century establishment [Music] in 1749 England was suffering from high unemployment and failed harvests [Music] Ashwood decided to open up an existing chalk quarry on his land to resurface the road from here to London and provide much needed work for the poor of his Parish [Music] it seems like a very socially aware and generous thing for dashwood to do and perhaps there was an element of that but as soon as you see these caves you quickly realize that providing work for the poor wasn't his only motive there was something else going on here this is no ordinary chalk Quarry going into the High caves you can immediately sense why there's so much gossip and myth about this place suddenly the atmosphere changes completely at the end of this quite long straight Corridor the tunnel takes an Abrupt turn to the left and heads yeah quite steeply downhill if I go off down there this is the last point at which daylight is going to be visible but probably more importantly this is the last point at which any prying eyes snooping around out there could see in it feels like I'm stepping down here into dashwood's secret underworld it's a strange place to explore and easy to see how rumors of erotic goings-on and even devil worship emerged from this dark and labyrinthine place the way that you design spaces and shapes for practical mining this is not ace this is the opposite archaeologist Ashley Tierney has been researching the hellfire club and their mysterious caves the sensible person would draw straight lines down straight lines out on the side knock these turns and Chambers and it just doesn't make any functional sense dashwood's miners were paid handsomely at one shilling a day for carving out the ornate series of tunnels and caves what must they have been asking themselves what is going on here I think they just thought of the flight of fantasy from someone who has too much money and too much time in his hands will do what he wants take the money go home very nice the tunnels descend for a quarter of a mile into the hillside the deeper they go the stranger and more elaborate the layout of the cage becomes step out of dashwood's subterranean world into his above ground estate and it's clear he was obsessed with classical symbolism Greek and Roman mythology fascinated him something that came from his time traveling Europe on a series of grand Tours sort of intellectual Gap years for the well-heeled Englishman on his return He Set about transforming his estate in an attempt to bring a bit of what he'd seen abroad back to Leafy buckinghamshire the main house down there bears very little resemblance now to the original dashboard had it completely remodeled to resemble the Greek and Italian architecture you so fell in love with he built a Folly in the form of a temple to the Roman goddess Venus but that wasn't all dashwood started up two new clubs for like-minded Grand tourers they were an opportunity to discuss the cultures and the politics they'd experienced abroad but they are also a great opportunity for getting drunk and letting loose there's nothing Dash would like more than a good party women booze oh and fancy dress it was the Age of Enlightenment and he and his friends wanted to break their shackles and experience all that life could throw at them but two and a half centuries ago someone of dashwood's wealth and fame couldn't do just what he wanted the emerging tabloid press was sniffing around after a story dashwood feared he might be in the firing line so they decided to leave the bars of London and Escape here to the country away from prying eyes but what did they really get up to in the privacy of the Hellfire caves [Music] I'm exploring the Hellfire caves in West Wickham to find out the secrets of the gentleman's underground Society the hellfire club so far I've been exploring tight tunnels but there's a surprise in store this has also only got quite a bit more cramp down there actually but wait for us I've seen this massive this is the banqueting hole after walking through narrow low spaces the high ceiling of this Cavern seems particularly spectacular and the space 40 feet in diameter feels huge this really was the kind of climax of the journey through all those tunnels in caves to suddenly boom out to this great big banqueting mall you could fit a lot of people in here and you could get up to all sorts of Mischief in here there are rumors that hellfire club members got up to a lot more than just underground dinner parties here small raised rooms with greater privacy are cut into the walls all these there's little entrances yes these are little niches north south east and west throughout this area okay and and these would have been higher off the ground so you wouldn't have been quite able to see into them probably when the ground was lower and that'll make a big difference in the way that you see these spaces and what you can or can't see that's happening inside them well what did they do in there I have a feeling it was a lot of shenanigans really yes it's thought that these were where the men would retire with female company for what they called private devotions so were well those rumors have kind of mass orgies true then down here um it's quite possible actually at the time in the 18th century masquerades and back in Aliens of these kind of drinking parties and dress-up parties where you just go wild this was normal accepted practice from majority of society some people might have turned up their nose at it but gentlemen's clubs did it everywhere and they probably brought the party down with them here today in the dark and the coal of the caves it takes some imagination to envisage the Antics people got up to here in the banqueting hall but letters written between the members of the club and accounts recorded shortly afterwards leave little doubts that a lot of free love went on [Music] the official members of recognized people who are part of this particular Club they would have been men but I think that a lot of women were invited as guests maybe just for the night or maybe a little bit longer and some of them may have ended up in some of these little niches quite possible wow it's kinky isn't it this place is incredible beyond the banqueting hall the cave Narrows again it's thought only members of the inner circle of 12 so-called disciples could go this far and this is where things get a little bit weirder at dashwood's request that mine has created this underground stream it's not actually an underground stream but water collected here and so the miners tunneled around the corners on both sides to give the impression of this stream disappearing off into the distance it's really quite creepy said to represent the mythical River sticks in Greek mythology it was the boundary between Earth and the underworld Hades it's places like this that fueled rumors that dashwood and his friends were indulging in dark rituals and even satanic practices in the depths of the caves and then beyond the river sticks is this Final in the chamber this is the deepest part of the whole Hellfire caves down here with 300 feet below the church on the top of the hill all we've been doing the whole way is coming down and down and down but what did go on down here in this Final in the chamber past the river Stakes was it something dark was it Satanic your mind absolutely races when you think about what dashboard might have been doing down here with whoever it is he brought down here it feels a little bit sinister it's been an amazing experience exploring dashwood's secret underworld and for me it's the level of secrecy and mystery over hundreds of years which led to the rumors of Satanic rituals and darker activities that might have gone on down here whereas actually dashwood and his contemporaries were highly intellectual highly adventurous highly curious individuals and this is really A Relic from the Age of Enlightenment them trying to find the most extreme ways of escapism from the expectations of the world above these guys were intellectual Playboys this is a theme park for free love and free thinking next week I'm in the south discovering a top secret nuclear bunker descending perilous tunnels under the sea and exploring a Subterranean Labyrinth with a mystical past [Music]

Channel: Spark

Views: 1,263,742

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, How To, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, space documentary, bbc documentary, Science documentary, urban exploring, urban exploration, exploring with, abandoned building, haunted house, abandoned mansion, britain, underground, underground secrets

Id: F43tbX325fA

Length: 133min 51sec (8031 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022