The 1832 tunnel is a "Grade Two listed" structure. If you're thin enough to squeeze between the three last vehicles, you find yourself under the great arch of the portal. It is (or was) blocked to a height of about eight feet by an earth bank, steep and slippery. The tunnel, built with local stone and some brick, is seventy yards long, seven wide and high. It doesn't contain much rubbish, but in the dark I stumbled against a mound in the middle, built by kids for "BMXing" (riding moto-cross vehicles).

At the far end is another high earth bank; then you're out in the uninhabited half of the cutting. Discarded among the trees to the left are some rusty lengths of track, including the curve of a points system, taken from the old Axminster-to-Lyme railway. They were used, twenty or more years after the 1965 closing of the railway, to support sheets of metal sealing off the tunnel. Then it was considered that the seal was too thorough—people might become trapped inside—so the earthen banks were thrown up instead.

Not much farther on in this direction is a Thistlegate House; and the hillside through which the tunnel bores is Thistle Hill; so I wondered whether the whole feature was known as Thistlegate. But it is more prosaically referred to as the Charmouth Tunnel, because Charmouth is slightly nearer than Lyme—and was the next place along the road, before the Charmouth bypass was built.

Think of digging tunnels nearly two centuries ago, with picks and buckets—or for that matter canals, which sometimes had to be horizontal for lengths up to thirty-five miles. Would the tunnelers meet in the middle? King Hezekiah, preparing Jerusalem for the siege by the terrible Assyrians in 701 B.C., had a tunnel dug to bring water from the spring Gihon through the hill of Ophel to a reservoir, the Pool of Siloam, inside the city; the Bible only briefly mentions this feat (II Kings 20:20 and II Chronicles 32:30) but the excitement of the tunnelers when they met was recorded in an inscription discovered in 1880. (When we visited Arab friends in the hamlet Silwân, they led us wading through this tunnel.) The Charmouth tunnelers celebrated their successful meeting in a different way: before stepping from one side to the other, they went to the nearest farm, which was at the site now called Penn (also where the old Penn Inn used to stand), brought the farmers' new baby, and ceremonially passed him through the midpoint first. He was the great-great-grandfather of the present farmer (though the farmhouse is now in a different place).

Back through the tunnel to Shady Hollow.