Singing Cavern

Image: © Rudi Winter Taken: 8 Jun 2014

A branch tunnel from the Dudley canal tunnel leads to Singing Cavern, a former limestone mine inside Castle Hill. The cavern originally stretched about half a mile towards Dudley's town centre but much of it has collapsed since it was last mined in the early 1800s. The canal only ran part way of the mine, with the rest of the cavern accessed via a tramway. There are vertical shafts alongside Singing cavern. The limestone rockface can be seen on the left, with the end of the canal (but not the cavern) ahead. Photo taken from a boat of the Dudley Canal Trust, who operate tours of the mines and tunnels; the green structure in the foreground is part of the boat. The error in the surface position is about 200m as the branch canal isn't shown on the map. Castle Hill and nearby Wren's Nest are anticlines of Silurian limestone layers protruding from the surrounding Carboniferous coal beds. Both the limestone and the coal were quarried from the beginning of the industrial revolution and used in the iron smelting industry of the West Midlands of England. Mining finally ceased in 1920. The Dudley canal was completed in 1791, running in a tunnel under Castle Hill for nearly 3km in a SSW direction. Several branch canals were built around the same time to access the limestone seams in the Castle Hill anticline, which run roughly SSE. In addition, there is a westerly branch leading to Wren's Nest. Multiple caverns have been excavated inside Castle Hill, some of which up to 800m in length. Many of the caverns have had roof collapses and rock falls and have since been backfilled. However, some are still accessible by boat through the original tunnels and a few new link tunnels built in the 1980s to enable the Dudley Canal Trust to run circular tours for visitors to see the mines. A schematic map of the canal system is shown on the Trust's website https://web.archive.org/web/20150101180643/http://www.dudleytunnel.co.uk/mines.html (archive link).

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0