The old workings
Below Radworth
Off the north ring road
A mile out of town, eighty-odd metres back from the north ring road and a long way from the nearest front door, there is a capped well in the ground with a rope ladder going down it. Nothing marks it. Nobody in Oakhaven brings it up.
Below the cap the town stops and something a great deal older starts: twelve stretches of worked passage running out under the fields, torches burning in brackets driven into the rock, and braziers stood on the floor wherever the roof is high enough to take one. Three chambers are left dark on purpose. Two of them have under five feet of headroom and the third is inside the rock itself.
There are drops down there that go a long way and give you no warning, so the second ladder is not a convenience. Whatever the workings were cut for, it was not the council.
- Twelve stretches of passage
- Twenty-four torches, five braziers
- Two rope ladders
- 1.05 miles from your front door