THE BURN/BOURNE HILL TUNNELS

Tunnels make great stories and there are many stories about tunnels under Bourne Hall and Bourne Hill, but a few points might be worth considering.

The site of Bourne Hall is around 8 metres (26 feet) above the sea-level plain towards Rossall (Hall), just over 1 mile away (see image 1). A tunnel from the hall would have had to be dug, by hand, to a depth of at least 10 metres (33 feet) through soft soil. It would have needed shoring all along its length to prevent collapse, needing a lot of wood (remember the film The Great Escape?), and, because of the distance, it would also have needed ventilation shafts to the surface at regular intervals along its length. The land around Bourne Hill was marshy, crossed by a few streams and susceptible to flooding which would have inundated any tunnel.

Maybe what people remembered were cellars. The Harris & Hughes book ‘The History of The Wyre’ (page 112) compares legend and fact about the Bourne tunnel. The book may be available from https:lulu.com.

Another legend claims that a tunnel existed between Bourne Hall and the North Euston Hotel (see image 2). This is even more unlikely. Not only is the distance greater - at over 2.5 miles but, before the land was reclaimed, a tunnel, dug at greater depth, would have had to pass partly under the River Wyre estuary, for a distance of over 1.5 miles, which would have been a major engineering challenge at the time. 

There are however slightly more plausible, but unsubstantiated, stories that troops stationed at the hotel in the 1860s, when it had been taken over as a school of musketry, built tunnels from the cellars to the beach to avoid the stares of the townsfolk. Why bother?

DWH 4/2026