Deep beneath a garden in Ainsdale, just north of Liverpool in the UK, lies something truly unusual: a hidden network of tunnels and caverns carved out of sand in one man’s backyard. Francis Proctor, 76, created all this over the course of 30 years, turning what even he admits is a “daft idea” into a cave system six meters underground.
A retired photographer, Proctor first imagined his cave after visiting the famous Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire. In the beginning, the idea was quite simple: create a subterranean room accessible from the garden. The soil in the area was a big issue. His house sits on the sand dunes near Ainsdale Beach.
“If you dig into sand, you can imagine what would happen — it would just collapse in on itself, so you’d think it would be almost impossible to build caves here,” he told a local news outlet.
Shoring up the sand walls with concrete proved the key. Photo: SWNS
Five-foot-thick walls
Luckily, his wife Barbara, a mathematician, had a solution. When they built an extension, they underpinned the side of the house. Barbara looked at the plans, did the calculations, and explained what needed to be done.
“We had to build by shoring the walls up from the top downwards, creating five-foot-thick concrete walls to shore up the excavation,” he told the Liverpool Echo.
And so work began. Using only spades and shovels, Proctor dug deeper and peeper until he had his cavern.
The project crept forward over three decades. Over time, it became so much more than a single cave. Proctor excavated chamber after chamber, creating tunnels, spacious caverns, and quirky features. It is not merely a hole under the ground; it includes a bridge, a waterfall, and objects that the pair collected from around the world, including a skeleton prop rescued from a Hollywood film set.
Photo: SWNS
Visitors astonished
Despite the elaborate cave system, you would have no idea from the front of the house that anything out of the ordinary existed. Only those who enter through the garden gate can see the incredible creation. Although Proctor began it as a personal passion project, ever since people found out about the quirky garden, they have wanted to see it.
“It was something to do that I enjoyed,” said Proctor. “It was a surprise when people started taking a lot of interest in it, and now more and more people are coming to see it.”
The site is now listed under the National Garden Scheme, which opens private gardens to the public, and visitors come from across Britain to see what the Proctors created. Gardeners and visitors are astonished by the scale of the caves and the technical accomplishment of making them by hand.
Proctor hams it up deep underground. Photo: SWNS
Ever since Barbara died four years ago, the garden has become a tribute. A plaque inscribed “Barbara’s Garden” marks the entrance. There is also a historic foundation stone from Southport Hospital, laid in 1922 by the Earl of Derby, that Proctor located and dedicated in her memory exactly one hundred years later.
“We wouldn’t have been able to do any of this if it weren’t for the fact that Barbara worked out how we could dig into the sand,” he explained.
