Sevastopol and the Malvern to Colwall Tunnel

The opening of the beautiful Gothic revival station at Great Malvern in 1860, sponsored by Lady Emily Foley, was far from the end of the project to provide a direct railway link between Hereford and the rest of the English cities. The project stalled while engineers considered how to progress the railway to Ledbury by constructing a tunnel through the hard igneous rock of the Malvern Hills and Worcestershire publisher Edwin Lees had written, in February 1856, that the tunnel was closed and the works abandoned for want of funds.

Eventually, it was decided to employ a tunnelling machine that had been built for siege works at Sevastopol, in the Crimea, four years previously. Scientific American (volume 12, 1856) reported, ‘A new steam boring machine for tunnelling through rock has been invented and put into operation by Captain Penrice of the Royal Engineers, England.  It consists of a strong crosshead of wrought iron, secured to the outer extremity of the piston road [sic] of a horizontal steam engine, and on this cross head there are twenty-four short arms studded with diamond-pointed steel cutters.  By the forward stroke of the piston these cutters strike against the rock, and by a self-acting device are then partially rotated and the piston returns; on the succeeding stroke or blow, the cutters strike a new part of the rock, and so on bore into the rock by an intermittent rotary motion of repeated blows, similar to that given to the chisel in rock drilling by hand … The engine is secured on a truck, and moves forward to its work on rails. An experimental machine cut its way into sandstone rock at the rate of twenty inches per hour, making a hole five feet in diameter’.

Unfortunately, the 1433m (1,567 yards) Colwall tunnel involved more than sandstone. As the machine moved towards the syenite core of the hills, blades blunted and boring halted. Springs deluged the machine and workers, and the many fissures made blasting impossible.

Teams of miners were brought in from the Welsh coalfields to use their expertise and resilience to progress the tunnel by hand. They managed only to progress only by 6 inches per day and their working conditions, in the glow of mining lamps surrounded by pitch darkness with freezing spring water pouring down, conjures a scene from Hell. The amount of water pouring on the unfortunate men can be appreciated from the need to devise a system of pumps to stop the springs on the hills from running dry. The Malvern Advertiser (7 September 1861) paid tribute to those who, ‘despite the utmost discouragement and difficulty, have unremittingly persevered, after years of patient toil ... their faith has truly moved mountains’.

The operation attracted huge interest amongst local geologists of the Malvern Naturalists’ Field Club. In 1855 their secretary, Mr Walter Burrow, was presented with a specimen of black shiny material collected from within the shaft, that was identified by the Oxford geology department as graphite, a rare mineral previously unrecorded in the Malverns.

A plan was formulated to explore the workings, of which club president, Rev. William Samuel Symonds, later reported, simply, that ‘an exploration was … made by a committee of members of the Club, amidst darkness, debris, water, and mud, the first of many such expeditions into the heart of the Malverns during the period of the excavation of the Worcester and Hereford Railway’. 

Malvern Club members Edwin Lees, secretary Walter Burrow, and vice-president Rev. Francis Dyson were appointed to descend into the shaft and investigate. Lees takes up the story – ‘The party having arranged themselves in the scuttle, with a guide, who had unfortunately lost an arm since the commencement of operations here by being too rapidly drawn up over the wheel, booked themselves for Erebus; and the signal being given, soon sunk out of view in their progress to “the night-side of nature”. The old adage of “facilis descensus Averni” [‘ the descent to Hell is easy’ – from Virgil’s Aenead] was well exemplified in our case; for, losing sight of the upper regions rather rapidly, we came down with a bump that elicited a cry of “Where are we got to?” from some of the party; followed by a rapid and somewhat undignified tumbling out of the tub where we had been ensconced’.

The party then proceeded to investigate the tunnel by lantern and candle-light, and ‘trundled along in one of the hand-carriages for the conveyance of rubbish to the bottom of the shaft’, mapping the rocks along the tunnel. Lees, a botanist, was intrigued by a white fungus, growing luxuriantly in the damp and darkness, that ‘when exposed to the influence of light assumes a bright orange colour’. The expedition ended abruptly when ‘a blast was fired at the end of the syenitic gallery; - a hollow sound shook the earth beneath, our ears rang with the reverberation, and sulphureous fumes, filling the passages and floating heavily along, made the explorers of these Tartarean shades rather anxious to scent again the upper regions of air. We therefore took our last observations and measurements; and then, arranging ourselves in the scuttle as best we could, were, after a nervous whirl round or two as we approached the top, safely landed again on the bright side of Nature, having been upwards of two hours in the bowels of the earth’.

Symonds thought that ‘probably many years will pass before human eyes will again rest upon the vast masses of greenstone, the great veins of red syenite, and shales containing fossils, which are enshrouded in the bosom of the Hills’.