It started with a Facebook thread — neighbors in the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham trading half-remembered stories about tunnels running beneath their streets and gardens. Most people scrolled past. Dave Green did not.
Convinced the legends deserved a real answer, Green rallied fellow villagers, brought in professional cavers and tunnel engineers, and founded the Bloxham Underground Tunnel Society. What the group has uncovered since — a spreading network of passageways, artifacts, and animal remains — suggests the stories were concealing something far older than anyone in the village had assumed.
A Facebook thread that launched an underground expedition
The 2024 Facebook discussion in Bloxham grew quickly into something more than casual nostalgia. Villagers were comparing stories they’d carried for years — tales of passages running beneath gardens and streets — but the thread also exposed contradictions. Some accounts didn’t hold up. “A few of the comments were thought not to be accurate,” Green later said, “so we decided to investigate some of the myths and the published articles involving the tunnels.”
Green assembled a six-person team: himself as chairman, alongside Martyn Wyatt, Tom Smith, Simon Finch, Martin Whitton, and Jim Smithson. Different skills, different backgrounds — the society had practical range from day one.
Their approach combined field exploration with careful archival work. Digging through old editions of the Banbury Guardian, the group found that a large cavern on Cumberford Hill had been discovered as far back as 1908, then rediscovered in 1954. That paper trail confirmed the legends had at least some documented basis beneath them.
Into the tunnels: what the team found underground
Before anyone descended, professional cavers conducted a full inspection and risk assessment. Once they cleared the space as safe, the society entered its first tunnel — and the experience, Green said, was far from disappointing.
The main passage ran approximately 40 feet, with several smaller sections branching off to the sides. Much of the floor had been raised over time with soil and rubble, leaving only scattered areas where the team could stand upright. Despite the cramped conditions, the group recovered a notable collection of artifacts: a Victorian-era glass bottle, a leather shoe sole, pottery fragments, and a tin pot.
A second significant discovery came unexpectedly. A digger driver excavating soil for a garage foundation at the back of a village property broke through into another tunnel at roughly four feet deep. “He uncovered a hole of a good size that led into the tunnel,” Green told the Banbury Guardian. The find extended the known network and confirmed that more lay hidden beneath ordinary residential ground.
Clues to a much older past
The Victorian artifacts pointed to relatively recent use, but one find shifted the timeline considerably. Among the animal bones recovered in the most recently uncovered cave was a red deer skull. “It was a long, long time ago when red deer roamed the countryside,” Green told the BBC. “It was definitely pre-medieval.”
That single object opened the possibility that the tunnels predate the Victorian artifacts by centuries — those items may simply reflect later reuse of much earlier structures. Green has proposed the network could date to the Roman period, with the passages potentially serving different communities across many centuries. One suggested chapter of that history involves Catholic clergy using the tunnels during the English Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII.
Carbon dating of the bones is now being sought. Green acknowledged the process is difficult, but results could provide the clearest timeline yet for when the tunnels were first constructed.
Expert support and the scope still to uncover
The Bloxham Underground Tunnel Society hasn’t worked alone. The group enlisted Professor Colin Eddie, described as one of the country’s leading tunnel experts, along with Dr. Henry Pairaudeau, a specialist in tunnel engineering and design. Oli Campbell, president of the Birmingham University Caving Club, joined with members of his team, bringing both technical expertise and hands-on caving experience to the effort.
The picture emerging from their combined work is one of multi-purpose infrastructure — tunnels used at different times for stone extraction, religious activity, and concealed movement. Escape routes or hiding places would have carried obvious value during periods of religious persecution.
What remains unknown is still considerable. The full extent of the network hasn’t been mapped, the original builders haven’t been identified, and much of the system is unexplored. As Green put it, people across Britain walk daily above tunnels that historians still can’t explain. In Bloxham, the society intends to keep digging — literally and archivally — until more of that hidden past surfaces. Carbon dating results, when they arrive, may prove the most consequential data point yet in determining just how deep this village’s underground history really runs.