Myths and half remembered stories of Hough End Hall

We all like those edgy little mysteries and even when there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for an event from the past some people prefer a mystery.

Usually it revolves around a tunnel which someone who knew someone had fallen across and explored for miles before coming out in the most unexpected of places.

Now I know such tunnels exist and some like those under Manchester have been well documented.

Most have a logical explanation for their construction and even those that still baffle the experts will once have been the product of a sensible plan with a clear purpose.

Here in Chorlton there is the story of the tunnel that runs from the Horse and Jockey to the old parish church another from Barlow Moor Hall to Hough End Hall and others from Hough End out in all directions.

I would be foolish to dismiss them entirely but as far as I know none have been opened up in the last few decades and no Corporation work team has broken into them in the course of digging sewers, water pipes or all the other services from telephone cables to gas mains.

After all why would anyone in a rural area bother to dig one unless it was perhaps for a job creation scheme?

And I remain sceptical of the story often propounded by old locals in the Horse and Jockey that their tunnel was an escape route from the parish church during the persecution of Catholics during the Elizabethan period.

Certainly no evidence for it was found during the archaeological digs undertaken by Angus Bateman in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Nor can I think that the residents of Barlow Hall who were Catholics would dig a tunnel across to Hough End Hall whose owners were not.

Not that this has stopped people talking of Hough End tunnels.  Just recently I was told that there were those who remember discovering such tunnels in their youth.

It is more likely that these were the cellars of the outbuildings which grew up around Hough End Hall over its four hundred year history.

Some might even be the remnants of an ice house which before the invention of the modern refrigerator was the means of keeping a supply of ice.

That said I doubt I will convince everyone.

In the same way that there are a few who maintain they saw the Hall burn down sometime in the 1930s even though there is no evidence for this in the memory of those most closely associated with the Hall or in the newspapers.

But such stories continue to have a powerful place in the imagination of some and it maybe that I will yet be proved wrong about the tunnels of Hough End Hall.

We shall see.

Pictures; the garden of the Hall circa 1900 from the Lloyd Collection, the Hall looking west courtesy of Nora Templar 1910 and in 1895 from the Wesleyan Handbook