IN 1940 a Cirencester woman made a discovery that makes her a firm believer there is a hidden network of tunnels under the town.    

There have long been rumours of tunnels which run to the Parish Church and now demolished abbey, and the theory is that monks and priests built them to flee from danger during the Reformation of the church in the 1500s.

In the past few months, businesses based in Cirencester’s Market Place have come forward to report bricked up passageways in their cellars which they believe could be tunnel entrances.

And now 84-year-old May Bunt, who used to live in the Abbey Grounds, has contacted the Standard to say she has been in one of the tunnels.

Mrs Bunt was born and raised in a house that adjoined the Norman Arch building as her father, Walter Akerman, was the butler for Major James Gordon Dugdale who lived in the Abbey House, which has since been converted into flats.

In 1940, a 10-year-old Mrs Bunt was playing with two friends and her sister when the group spotted a stone slab on the ground next to a tree in the Abbey Grounds, near to the Norman Arch.

The youngsters removed the slab,  revealing a hole beneath.

Mrs Bunt said she climbed down and found herself inside a tunnel, which she described as narrow and full of roots from the tree.

Afraid, she turned back and clambered up into the Abbey Grounds again.

“I was crouched down and I could see roots in front of me. I was too frightened and I remember the other three were all laughing at me,” she said.

Mrs Bunt said that when Major Dugdale heard about the discovery he decided to fill in the tunnel with the help of her father as he thought youngsters could fall in and hurt themselves.

“Major Dugdale and my father were frightened and so they had it filled in,” she said.

Several days after that, when Major Dugdale was planting trees in a spot several hundred metres from the hole, he found another tunnel which he also filled in, Mrs Bunt said.

Mrs Bunt explained that the two tunnels were in perfect line with the site of the old abbey, which was demolished in the 1500s during the Reformation .

She said there is more evidence to prove there are tunnels under the town.

In the pantry in her home there was a circular stone slab on the floor which covered the entrance to a tunnel  her family had been told led to the abbey, she said.

“We thought it was all part of the monastery,” she said. “We imagined monks coming up through the monastery.”

Mary Hester,77, is another Cirencester woman who is adamant that the tunnels exist.

She lived in Dyer House in Dyer Street as a child and said there was a door in the basement of her home and that her parents told her it led to a tunnel to the parish church.

But Mary said she and her siblings  never opened the door  as they were fearful of what they might find, adding: “We thought somebody was going to come up and get us.”

Have you found evidence of tunnels? Email bmc@wiltsglosstandard.co.uk.