I lived in Stockingford when I was a young lad back in the 1960’s. I remember many disused brick and tile works and clay-pits as well as disused collieries being dotted around Stockingford common. It was a very dangerous place for us young folk to go play but it was also exiting and stimulating: I remember many adventures swimming in the clay-pits and exploring the disused infrastructure of this redundant industrial landscape.
I remember one particular clay-pit that was about 80 feet deep! One day a ‘slip’ of ground occurred in this pit. A good section of the side of the clay hole had slipped down in to the little pond at the bottom of the pit. The slip exposed a tunnel; it was a steel arched roadway about 40 feet down vertically from the rim of the clay-pit itself. Some friends and me tentatively entered this tunnel, the tunnel was at a slight gradient of about 1 in ten and the floor was muddy and damp. We didn’t get very far and soon ‘bottled out’ and scrambled our way back out of it. We didn’t even come back equipped with torches to explore further.
I’m an ex coal miner and I am therefore quite knowledgeable about subterranean worlds, from what I remember this tunnel was in a very good state of repair, it continued in both directions where exposed in the side of the claypit, and I can only guess as to how far it might have extended. As for its purpose and if it was part of a clay pit or coal mine I cannot say. But the location of the clay pit was only 250 yards from the site of the drift mine Stockingford colliery. What I am sure of though, is the location on the map of the actual tunnel itself and I recon it run’s under Kiln Close.
Its possible that my grandfather worked at Stockingford colliery in the 1920’s, I remember my mum talking about a pit named the Dry-Bread-Pit.
The pit I worked at was Baddesley.