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As a change from canoeing in the open air, there is opportunity for underground exploring by canoe if you can find a disused canal tunnel with its entrance not blocked. A cycle lamp should be hung round your neck when penetrating the Stygian darkness and eerie, vault-like passages of these forgotten waterways. Their dank roofs bristle with fragile macaroni-like stalactites in a strange world silent save for the monotonous and regular plink-plop sound of dripping water.

The Hardham Canal near Pulborough in Sussex is an example of a waterway with an abandoned tunnel which may still allow access by canoe. Before this two-miles-long canal closed over a century ago, it cut across land almost enclosed by loops of the River Arun and had a tunnel stretching a quarter of a mile, which was adjacent to Hardham Priory.

A report made by the most recent expedition records that a mountain of clay obstructs this tunnel near the north-western end, preventing more than forty yards’ canoeing. This had apparently been deposited there through a hole in the roof during the laying of a railway track above. By going through the other end of the tunnel, however, the canoeists accomplished a voyage of 300 yards. These human moles considered the exertion of manhandling their canoe across fields to the mouth of the tunnel to have been quite worthwhile.

In 1892 The Model-Yachtsman and Canoeist, in describing a trip down the River Tamar in Devon, referred to a long derelict canal tunnel used by miners between Tavistock and Morwellham. ‘One of our canoeists on this cruise,’ the magazine contributor wrote, ‘could a tale unfold of horrors and dangers met and overcome in successfully navigating this underground passage which extends for nearly two miles.’

A recognized location for underground canoeing is in Oxford where the Trill Mill stream can be navigated in fifteen minutes downstream or thirty minutes upstream. Lawrence of Arabia is supposed to have been the first explorer of this culvert under the city; and one university student did it eleven times in a year.

The trip is adventurous but hardly recommended after rain, for then you may be decapitated if not lying flat in the canoe. One man was swept at speed along this Trill Mill stream and got wedged against a low pipe. While trying to extricate himself from this predicament, he found to his dismay that an enormous brown rat, savage in appearance, had clambered on board, which goes to show that every canoe trip is different! Incidentally, by shouting and banging his paddle against the boat he frightened the animal which promptly dived into the water and swam away.

As a last word about canoeing below ground, let me mention that small canoes of the inflatable type have been employed in caving expeditions, but generally for crossing subterranean lakes rather than negotiating underground rivers. In these circumstances ping-pong bats serve as paddles where lack of headroom makes the employment of conventional paddles impracticable, if not impossible.