Gavin Grimmer
Once again in Joan Dighton/Robinson’s words, “We used to go down a tunnel not far from our house which came out on the water front near the sewer outlet, there were also other tunnels going off that one as we walked down it. This is the tunnel we used when we went fishing.” The position of their house is the one shown in the cropped section below of “Sheet 1 of 12” as with the identification of “House”.
Note on this sheet the barely visible objects. The two questioned rectangles turned out to be a couple of small sheds but the other questioned marks at this point I have no clue what they are about.
The object besides the “a” has for many years been recognised as the entrance to the ‘Dighton’s Tunnel’ and as you would have observed through the photo collage, you’ll understand why.
In one or two photos, this object seems to be in slightly different places, but this
is just an illusion caused by the type of lens on the camera and the angle the shot
was taken from. If you imagine a line along the edge of the veranda of the house,
you’ll see it is always in the same place. The two photos with the large red arrow
across them (7-07-1958) - the right hand one is a zoomed and cropped image of the
left hand photo showing very clearly the tunnel entrance. Note the track through
the corner of the hedge from around the house, over to the entrance, and then it
turns into the lead-in to the entrance. 
From the photos you can see this entrance
was visible from 1939 to 1975 and it appears it was covered over towards the end
of 1987 as you can see in the photo dated 12-11-1987 that the area had been recently
landscaped to basically what is there today.
.
Going by Peter Golder’s description of it being on quite a steep incline, I used the “Elevation Profile” function on Google Earth to get an idea of the incline.
As shown, this calculates to an incline of 7.3:1 and somewhere in the vicinity of 900 feet long.... which tends to show that the higher outlet for this tunnel that Peter Golder remembers has to be on the opposing side of the hill otherwise the angle of the incline would be too steep to be practical, hence it is my belief that what Peter described was the lower end of the Dighton tunnel.
NH Page 29
