Halliggye Fogou Tunnels

We live for exploring places that are off the usual tourist radar and my mom, who joined us on our UK trip, was pretty game for anything. An Iron Age, underground Cornish tunnel seemed like a good place to take her. :)

Fogou comes from the Cornish word 'ogo', meaning cave. Why and how the 'f' was added in, no one seems to know. It kind of sounds like an insult to my American ears. No one also seems to know what the exact purpose of fogous were --there are approximately a dozen surviving caves like these littered across Cornwall. Perhaps they were places of refuge or storage chambers or ritual shrines.

The Halliggye Fogou are a part of the Trelowarren Estate. The tunnels themselves are free to visit and there is a small parking area just at the base of the hill where the fogou is located.

Don't mind my husband. I can't take him anywhere sometimes. :P

This entrance was inadvertently created when, during repair work in 1980, a plough accidentally put a hole in the roof of the large chamber. English Heritage stabilized the hole and turned it into the modern entrance.

We were only armed with the lights on our phones. Flashlights would have been a brilliant idea as the fogous are extremely dark --something we had not thought of when we were in the middle of packing for our trip across the pond.

The straight chamber is 65.6 feet / 20 meters long and joins a curving passageway that is 91.8 feet / 28 meters long. It ends with a 'creep' --no, not a man waiting to scare your pants off. A 'creep' over there is just a significantly smaller passage. Back in the Victorian ages, a series of excavations here revealed a vase containing ashes, animal bones (possibly from a deer), and a Celtic pottery cup.

During World War II, Halliggye Fogou was used to store ammunition by the Manaccan Auxiliary Unit. Today it holds nothing but secrets and during winter when the fogou is closed, endangered horseshoe bats that like to hibernate there.