Secret Passage - Via Occulta - Geheimgang

[Chrissie777]

This morning I was awake very early and almost finished reading "Five go adventuring again".
What I enjoy so much about this FF book and it's predecessor FOATI is the description of the underground passage/secret passage and I started wondering why am I so fascinated about secret passages all life long?
That's why I would love to hear from other forumites how and why they got interested in secret passages.

Giving it more thought, I realized that it was years before I discovered the Famous Five books that I had my own secret passage "adventure".
I was born in Munich, Germany. When I was 5 years old, we moved to a lovely little town in the Altmuehltal in an area of Bavaria called Franken. The name of the town is Treuchtlingen.
I went to Kindergarten and when I started with going to elementary school, I already knew all my class mates from Kindergarten which was lovely and made getting used to going to school a lot easier.

In Treuchtlingen we lived at the bottom of Castle Hill Road (there was a ruined castle on the top of the hill which many years later in the 1990's when I saw it again was renovated) and on the other side of the road going up Castle Hill was the forester's house.
My best friend Jutta had 3 sisters.Their house was located a bit further up on Castle Hill. It was surrounded by a huge garden which had very high grass and was perfect for playing hide and seek in the summer. Between two old trees was a hammock (I always longed for a hammock when I was growing up...for me it was the epitome of luxury ).

One snowy day in the winter of 1960/1961 my best friend Jutta and I decided to take her sled and race down Castle Hill. Usually there was not much traffic (only few Germans owned cars in the early 1960's) as there were not many houses further up Castle Hill, so we felt pretty safe and thoroughly enjoyed racing downhill on her sled several times.
However, when we raced down again, the big black car of the forester turned into Castle Hill and as much as we tried to brake, we slightly hit the front bumper of his car.
The bumper had no damage, we were unharmed, but the old white-haired and bearded forester yelled at us. Then he walked into his big house.
Behind the house was a garden with a cherry tree where Jutta and some other friends including me picked cherries in the summer when the forester was not at home.

But there was something even more interesting for me in front of the forester's house right next to Castle Hill Road. It was a short tunnel, probably created for rain water to be diverted from flooding Castle Hill Road (my husband believes it might be called a "culvert").
In the summer when it was dry, Jutta, my other friends and I often climbed into this little tunnel and even though we were barely 6 years old, we had to duck. So it was not a very high tunnel.

For a few years this was the only secret tunnel that I knew of until I watched the old 1957 CFF version of FOATI on German TV which must have been around 1964, because I had watched the film already, before I read my very first EB book in the fall of 1965 (and that was one of the FF books).

Then this morning I started thinking about other books that contain secret passages (there are not too many... EB, of course, Norman Dale used them in some of his adventure books, and Anne Golon describes a secret passage in one of her first "Angélique" novels when her protagonist goes to their town house in Paris and discovers a secret passage in their garden).
So I was wondering if there are more books with secret passages?
Do you know of any?

I also thought about movies with secret passages like several of the old British CFF films (FOATI, The Carringford School Mystery, The Secret Tunnel), one of the 4 old Nancy Drew movies with Bonita Granville contains a secret passage and so does "My Name is Julia Ross" with Nina Foch which takes place in Cornwall.
Does anybody know of other films with secret passages?

It's too bad that Francis no longer participates, because he could have told us all about Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit who lived until 1606 in England and who created many priest holes in his life time.

Well, I'm looking forward to all your secret passage stories and contributions and maybe that way I'll discover a few more books or movies on my favorite topic.
In real life I never met somebody who was sharing my interest in secret passages, but the nice thing about the Internet is that it brings people with similar interests together.

[Anita Bensoussane]

A great post, Chrissie! When I was a young child (aged 4 - 5) my sister and I and the two children next door would be taken on picnics to Hope Mountain in North Wales. There was an outcrop of rock there, quite long, and we would squeeze into the hollow beneath it and call it our "cave" or "tunnel". It certainly wasn't enclosed though. Other than that, I enjoyed seeing round cave networks and slate mines etc. with my family or with school. However, there were always adults present so it didn't really feel like being in an Enid Blyton book. When we were about nine and ten, my sister and I visited some friends who lived in an old house built up against a hill. They claimed to have a secret passage but we weren't allowed to see it so it's possible that it never existed (their mother talked about it as if it were real, but maybe she was just playing along).

I came across underground passages in various books as a child, e.g. in stories from comics/annuals and in books by Nina Bawden, Malcolm Saville, Mark Twain, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and others. The sequence of caves and passages in Enid Blyton's The Valley of Adventure has always been a favourite.

[pete9012S]

Really enjoyed reading your post Chrissie.

Yes, I too have been a lifelong fan of secret passages.
I lived in a very old cottage when I was little, and reading the Famous Five books convinced me our house must contain a secret passage.

My brother and I removed the carpet in our downstairs bedroom and used my dad's drill to get through the floorboards.

There was a secret cavity under our room, with just enough room for us to crawl about.
There were a few old artifacts on the floor, which was completely sandy.

We couldn't replace the floorboards properly and my mum almost fell down the hole we had made and covered over with the carpet and a rug.

Next, we explored our attic. Nobody had been up there for years and years. We found old old papers and tools from a long distant age.

Next door was a large former dairy. There was a large brick-built room at the bottom of our garden that nobody had been in for years and years.

We first tried to get in by digging underground. That didn't work. So with a hammer and chisel we removed the bricks on our side of the garden.

It took time, and eventually, we broke through. We shone a torch into the gloom.
Tools, papers, and boxes of stuff lay everywhere.

I took a pristine newspaper that had been used to wrap up some ceramic pottery as a souvenir.



This was the newspaper I took - wish I had kept it!

Then in around 1980 whilst on holiday with my best friend Mike, I found and explored these old mines in North Wales:
Old Manganese mine in Wales
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKdV4WcfGV8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I will shut up for now!

[Anita Bensoussane]

The manganese mine looks interesting, Pete. My children and I have twice been to the Bronze Age Copper Mines on the Great Orme in Llandudno, North Wales. They're fun to explore as you go through the twisting rocky passages on your own, without a guide. On our first visit we got to hold a copper nugget, which was very heavy indeed. I was in my element as the Great Orme juts out into the sea, is full of gorse and seabirds and reminds me of the Isle of Gloom in some ways. I half expected a Great Auk to appear!

I lived in a very old cottage when I was little, and reading the Famous Five books convinced me our house must contain a secret passage.

My brother and I removed the carpet in our downstairs bedroom and used my dad's drill to get through the floorboards.

There was a secret cavity under our room, with just enough room for us to crawl about.
There were a few old artifacts on the floor, which was completely sandy.

We couldn't replace the floorboards properly and my mum almost fell down the hole we had made and covered over with the carpet and a rug.

Crumbs - that does sound Blytonian! I love the newspaper from the "secret room" too, with the headline about Paul quitting The Beatles!

[Chrissie777]

A great post, Chrissie! When I was a young child (aged 4 - 5) my sister and I and the two children next door would be taken on picnics to Hope Mountain in North Wales. There was an outcrop of rock there, quite long, and we would squeeze into the hollow beneath it and call it our "cave" or "tunnel". It certainly wasn't enclosed though. Other than that, I enjoyed seeing round cave networks and slate mines etc. with my family or with school. However, there were always adults present so it didn't really feel like being in an Enid Blyton book. When we were about nine and ten, my sister and I visited some friends who lived in an old house built up against a hill. They claimed to have a secret passage but we weren't allowed to see it so it's possible that it never existed (their mother talked about it as if it were real, but maybe she was just playing along).

I came across underground passages in various books as a child, e.g. in stories from comics/annuals and in books by Nina Bawden, Malcolm Saville, Mark Twain, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and others. The sequence of caves and passages in Enid Blyton's The Valley of Adventure has always been a favourite.

A great answer, Anita! ♥
Wales is still on my mental wish list of European destinations to explore.
Hopefully one day we'll be able to go there...

I also love caves and have visited a few with my father in Northern Germany. Later as an adult I went to Lascaux in the Dordogne area in France which my father still could visit in the 1950's as a student, before they closed it down and created Lascaux II for tourists.
One of the most exciting experiences was sailing on an underground river through Howe's Cavern in upstate New York (early 2000's). In December 2012 André and I visited Penn Cave in Pennsylvania while sailing on the little underground river.
In May 1981 on my very first UK trip we visited Cheddar Gorge and the cave.

Yes, Mark Twain's cave from his book "Tom Sawyer" is another place I would love to visit one day.

https://www.marktwaincave.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

My husband is a big Tolkien fan.
A few years ago we watched 16+ hours of "Lord of the Rings", "The Hobbit" and tons of bonus material and I remember the big dragon in the cave filled with gold.
In 1987 on a trip to Cornwall we stayed near Port Navas in a self-catered cottage overlooking Helford River, just opposite of Frenchman's Creek (Daphne DuMaurier). During our day trips we often passed the Tolkien Café. It had a white wall around the garden in which you could sit on sunny and dry afternoons. Inside was lots of Tolkien memorabilia on the walls.

In Cornwall (this was in May 1987) I came close to an underground passage which leads from a pub in Penzanze (I think it's called The Sarazen's Head) to the harbour.
And 1990 when I traveled with my first former husband along the Loire River, I saw the entrance to Leonardo DaVinci's underground passage leading to Amboise Castle which king François I had built, so he could visit DaVinci in private. It's in the basement of DaVinci's house Le Clos Lucé:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clos_Luc%C3%A9" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

William Ferguson, a contributor to the EBS Journal, recommended visiting the White Scar Cave in Northern Yorkshire, so we went there on our trip to the UK in May 2019, but unfortunately people with pacemakers cannot participate in the guided cave tour, so my husband did it without me and took some great photos.

I read Malcolm Saville's book "Treasure at the Mill" several times (and watched the DVD) and enjoyed the culvert scenes when the actors search for the treasure.

"The Valley of Adventure" is EB's master piece, no doubt about it.

Do you remember the title of Nina Bawden's book about the underground passage?

[Chrissie777]

Really enjoyed reading your post Chrissie.
Yes, I too have been a lifelong fan of secret passages.
I lived in a very old cottage when I was little, and reading the Famous Five books convinced me our house must contain a secret passage.
My brother and I removed the carpet in our downstairs bedroom and used my dad's drill to get through the floorboards.
There was a secret cavity under our room, with just enough room for us to crawl about.
There were a few old artifacts on the floor, which was completely sandy.
We couldn't replace the floorboards properly and my mum almost fell down the hole we had made and covered over with the carpet and a rug.
Next, we explored our attic. Nobody had been up there for years and years. We found old old papers and tools from a long distant age.
Next door was a large former dairy. There was a large brick-built room at the bottom of our garden that nobody had been in for years and years.
We first tried to get in by digging underground. That didn't work. So with a hammer and chisel we removed the bricks on our side of the garden.
It took time, and eventually, we broke through. We shone a torch into the gloom.
Tools, papers, and boxes of stuff lay everywhere.
I took a pristine newspaper that had been used to wrap up some ceramic pottery as a souvenir.
This was the newspaper I took - wish I had kept it!
Then in around 1980 whilst on holiday with my best friend Mike, I found and explored these old mines in North Wales:
Old Manganese mine in Wales
I will shut up for now!

Thank you, Pete. ♥
I will put the Manganese mine on our list of places to visit in Wales.

So what did your mom do when she almost fell into the cavity?

I still remember how shocked I was when I heard that the Beatles split up. I think it was in 1970, so I was almost 15 and a big Beatles fan for at least 5 years.

Please don't shut up.
As a matter of fact I'm hoping for more stories and suggestions for books and movies and real places to visit.

[pete9012S]

Thanks, Chrissie.

Here's another place I love to visit, Priests Hole Cave in The Lake District.
It has a visitor's book and when I went a stout metal box with goodies left for next visitors.
Somebody had even left a bottle of whisky for the next visitors when I went!

The Priest Hole Cave | Photographing A Hidden Gem In The Lake District:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI-svaS1ATQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Also:
https://www.lifesystems.co.uk/news/wild ... -hole-cave" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Katharine]

I can't be certain, but I think probably any interest I might have in secret passages, would stem from reading Five Go Adventuring Again. It was one of the few books my mother owned as a child, so may well have been the first Famous Five book I read.

Generally though, I think I prefer my secret passages to be in book form. I don't remember coming across any tunnels etc as a child, but as an adult I'd find them scary and claustrophobic.

[Boodi 2]

Thanks Chrissie and Pete, I really enjoyed reading your accounts. Although I don't think I have ever been in a secret passage (unless one counts the stone age burial chamber at Newgrange in Ireland!) I love caves and never miss an opportunity to visit one. I have been in caves in Austria and Ireland and there are lots of caves where we now live in the south-west of Germany, so I have spent many pleasant Sundays exploring them. My favourite is probably the Wimsener cave near Zwiefalten, which has to be explored by boat. There is also a fascinating cave (the Jux cave) very close to where we live, but unfortunately it is closed to the public (the entrance is barred by a huge iron gate).

[timv]

A very interesting post, Chrissie! I'm a fan of secret passages too, and think that the first one I read about was in Five Go Adventuring Again. As I've mentioned we had a passage, though not a secret one, at one of my primary schools , a converted Victorian mansion with an air of Gothic semi-neglect about it which was rather exciting and very stimulating to my imagination as an eight-year-old, in the late 1960s. This was a back entrance to a bedroom on the first (US second) floor, with a short passage - only half a man's height so you had to crawl through - about ten yards long into the servants' passage at the top of the back stairs, presumably to get furniture etc out of the room and down to the ground floor without disturbing the 'Family' of the house. At school we made the most of the possibilities of this as a secret passage, on the rare occasions that we were allowed to use it.

As well as reading about secret passages in adventure stories - and the ones under Mount Erebor in JRR Tolkien's 'The Hobbit' and in the Mines of Moria in 'The Lord of the Rings', another great influence on me - I came across powerful descriptions of explorations underground in Tolkien-like secret caves in Alan Garner's work. Specifically 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen', a Tolkien-like story of wizard, dwarves, elves, and other mythical people plus two ordinary British children who were accidentally in possession of a lost magical talisman that the 'baddies' and the 'good' wizard were both after. This was set at the real-life ex-copper-mines under Alderley Edge in Cheshire, S of Manchester. The book and its successors were very popular in the Puffin Books editions in the 1960s, but have now somewhat faded from the public consciousness - AG is still alive and wrote a follow-up 'adult' book about the main characters a few years ago. Caves and passages also appear in Arthur Ransome's 'Pigeon Post' - based on the real Tudor copper-mines under the Lake District mountains (Wetherlam and the Old Man of Coniston) near his home, which some of his friends were re-opening at the time in the 1930s. There's a scary moment in PP when the younger Swallows and the Callums go down the mine and nearly get caught in a rockfall, horrifying the more sensible John and Susan when they find out.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Wales is still on my mental wish list of European destinations to explore.
Hopefully one day we'll be able to go there...

I think you'd love the Great Orme in Llandudno, Chrissie, and Conwy Castle.

Do you remember the title of Nina Bawden's book about the underground passage?

It's called The Secret Passage but, if I remember correctly, the passage is only a short one leading between two houses.

I didn't know about Mark Twain's caves being open to the public but they sound fabulous!

[Chrissie777]

Thanks, Chrissie.
Here's another place I love to visit, Priests Hole Cave in The Lake District.
It has a visitor's book and when I went a stout metal box with goodies left for next visitors.
Somebody had even left a bottle of whisky for the next visitors when I went!
The Priest Hole Cave | Photographing A Hidden Gem In The Lake District:

Great, Pete!
I just watched both Youtube clips. The elevation would be too much for me (I already struggled with climbing up to Hadrian's Wall at Housesteads), but it's lovely to watch it.

[Chrissie777]

I can't be certain, but I think probably any interest I might have in secret passages, would stem from reading Five Go Adventuring Again. It was one of the few books my mother owned as a child, so may well have been the first Famous Five book I read.

Generally though, I think I prefer my secret passages to be in book form. I don't remember coming across any tunnels etc as a child, but as an adult I'd find them scary and claustrophobic.

The first FF book that I read was "Five on a Secret Trail" and I just discovered that there is a thread.

[Chrissie777]

Thanks Chrissie and Pete, I really enjoyed reading your accounts. Although I don't think I have ever been in a secret passage (unless one counts the stone age burial chamber at Newgrange in Ireland!) I love caves and never miss an opportunity to visit one. I have been in caves in Austria and Ireland and there are lots of caves where we now live in the south-west of Germany, so I have spent many pleasant Sundays exploring them. My favourite is probably the Wimsener cave near Zwiefalten, which has to be explored by boat. There is also a fascinating cave (the Jux cave) very close to where we live, but unfortunately it is closed to the public (the entrance is barred by a huge iron gate).

Hi Boodi 2, my big dream would be to explore the Blautopf which is in Schwaben, not too far from where you live I think.
But it's not open to the public.
I'll have to check if there is at least a documentary on Blautopf like the one from Werner Herzog on Chavet Cave at the Ardèche River in the South of France (Cave of Forgotten Dreams).
I've seen the caves in the cliff while doing white water rafting on the Ardèche when I was at boarding school in the Black Forest.

[Chrissie777]

...I came across powerful descriptions of explorations underground in Tolkien-like secret caves in Alan Garner's work. Specifically 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen', a Tolkien-like story of wizard, dwarves, elves, and other mythical people plus two ordinary British children who were accidentally in possession of a lost magical talisman that the 'baddies' and the 'good' wizard were both after. This was set at the real-life ex-copper-mines under Alderley Edge in Cheshire, S of Manchester. The book and its successors were very popular in the Puffin Books editions in the 1960s, but have now somewhat faded from the public consciousness - AG is still alive and wrote a follow-up 'adult' book about the main characters a few years ago. Caves and passages also appear in Arthur Ransome's 'Pigeon Post' - based on the real Tudor copper-mines under the Lake District mountains (Wetherlam and the Old Man of Coniston) near his home, which some of his friends were re-opening at the time in the 1930s. There's a scary moment in PP when the younger Swallows and the Callums go down the mine and nearly get caught in a rockfall, horrifying the more sensible John and Susan when they find out.

Tim, I've tried to read "The Owl Service" by Alan Garner when I was 40+ years younger, but couldn't get into it.
However, I've noticed that it was filmed as a TV series, so maybe I'll order it at amazon.co.uk next year. It sounds riveting.
Same with Arthur Ransome. After discovering the FF and other EB series, the German translation of "Swallows and Amazons" and another book which took place at Christmas seemed rather tame. However, I have two TV series based on Ransome's books. Still need to watch them.

In May 2019 we were very close to the Lake District (White Scar Cave), but unfortunately there was not enough time to explore plus we had 3 days of rain in the Yorkshire Dales and wanted to go further north. The further north we drove (Northumberland and Scotland), the better the weather became.
I guess we were lucky.