The Tunnels
Ask almost anyone who grew up in Armitage about Hawkesyard and the first thing they mention is not the house. It is the tunnels.
Dark, cool and slightly forbidding, their stone entrances half-hidden by ivy and bramble, they have long stirred the imagination. Stories have travelled with them for generations. One tunnel, it is said, runs all the way to Lichfield. Another leads to a hidden nunnery. Some say priests once used secret passages in troubled times. Others insist there were miles of underground routes beneath the hill.
As children, few of us needed much encouragement to believe it. The air inside is damp and still. Light fades quickly behind you. Voices echo strangely. Even in summer, the temperature drops as you step inside. It is easy to see how legend took root.
But step back nearly two hundred years, and those same tunnels tell a different story.
Not Secret — Designed
In Victorian times, the tunnels were not mysterious at all. They were deliberate features of a carefully planned show garden built by unemployed miners under the direction of Josiah Spode in the late 1840s.
Rather than secret escapes, they formed cool transitions between heated glasshouses and shaded fernery. They allowed visitors to move from warmth into shadow, from tropical brilliance into green calm. What feels slightly eerie today would once have felt theatrical — a contrast in temperature and light, carefully orchestrated.
And when visitors emerged from the tunnel’s cool darkness, they would have seen something extraordinary.
The Glasshouse on the Rock
Above them stood a glasshouse perched on a rocky mount, its panes catching the light like a small Crystal Palace, echoing the great Victorian fascination with glass and iron. From below it must have seemed almost magical — a greenhouse raised above the slope, glowing in the sun.
Climbing towards it, Victorian visitors from Armitage and nearby villages would have felt the air grow warmer. Inside were plants from distant continents: brilliant Ixoras blazing red and orange, orchids clinging in curious shapes, palms arching high under the roof.
In a great tank floated the immense leaves of the Victoria Regia, the giant water lily whose vast leaves could carry a child and caused excitement when it flowered here in the 1850s.
For parish families accustomed to fields, hedgerows and canal banks, this was a journey far beyond Staffordshire — without ever leaving the hill.
How Legends Grow
The tropical plants are long gone – sold in 1894 after the death of Josiah Spode IV. The great boiler chimney that once powered the heat was taken down in 1964. Most of the glasshouses have gone with just ‘the summer house’ remaining.
But the tunnels remain.
Perhaps it is no surprise that, once their original purpose faded from memory, stories filled the space. A passage to Lichfield sounds far more romantic than a Victorian garden walkway. A hidden nunnery makes a better tale than a fernery.
Yet in their own way, the truth is just as remarkable. These were not medieval escape routes but part of one of the region’s most ambitious show gardens — a place where heat, glass and imagination combined.
And perhaps that is why the legends persist. The tunnels were always meant to lead somewhere different.