Errwood Plughole Abseil + Woodhead Tunnel

© Gone

 After two very sunny and warm weeks, the rain had come back to England. It was cold, windy, and just very very wet, just one of these days you retreat to your sofa and drink some warm tea.

For some to me non apparent reasons though Millhouse had decided that it would be the perfect day to go to

a) the Peak district in the middle of the night, to

b) abseil into the errwood reservoir's plughole.

A plughole is one of a number of various designs that is used to provide the controlled release of flows from a reservoir to prevent any damage to the damn. When reaching a certain level, the water flows into the plughole, drops to the height of the land behind the damn, and flows underground for another few hundred meter.

© Gone

Just as Gone joined Millhouse and myself at the bottom of the hole, we heard some shouting from above. The fourth police car had just driven past. The three previous times they had just slowed down and driven off again, but this time they had stopped. By the time we surfaced, the police had left already, but had taken the names of the remaing four and told them to take off the ropes. Patrolling to check whether we would leave, we decided to call it a day.
Maybe some other day!

On the way home, Gone found some info regarding an old railway tunnel, Woodhead tunnel.

This  is what Wiki says:

The Woodhead Tunnels are three parallel trans-Pennine 3-mile long railway tunnels on the Woodhead Line, a former major rail link from Manchester to Sheffield. 

Woodhead 1 was one of the world's longest railway tunnels when it opened in 1845. Woodhead 2 was completed in 1853 and Woodhead 3 opened almost exactly 100 years later in 1953. Passenger services ended in 1970 and the last train passed through in 1981.

The tunnels are currently owned by National Grid plc who initially use Woodhead 1 and 2 to carry power cables and in 2008 started to install new cables in Woodhead 3.

Apart from the first few hundreds meter of building works, the tunnel was rather dull: long and fully coated in concrete, however, the thought of 400,000 Volts running through each of the cables in a few months time kept us awake.