Man hand-digs underground caves in backyard for 30 years

By James Connolly

A self-confessed "eccentric" has spent 30 years hand-digging an other-worldly labyrinth of underground caves 20 feet below the garden of his home.

From the outside, Francis Proctor's home looks perfectly normal to passers-by.

However, it's hiding a subterranean world of tunnels, caverns and quirky surprises that visitors can't help but gape at when they visit it at Southport.

Retired photographer Francis, 76, took 30 years to complete the project, which admits the whole project began with a daft idea.

The entire network was hand-dug by him using spades and shovels.

He said, "When we bought the house more than 50 years ago, I wanted to have an underground room that I could travel down to from the garden.

"It was pretty silly, but I got the idea from the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire."

His vision sparked three decades of work in a location that some thought would make it an impossible feat.

The house sits on sand dunes near Ainsdale Beach, so the thought of building caverns below the garden seemed unthinkable.

But Francis's late wife Barbara, a mathematician and statistician, had other ideas.

Francis said, "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.

"But the reason we were able to do it was because we underpinned the side of the house when we built an extension.

"Barbara looked at the plans and said it was quite straightforward. Under her direction, she explained what we needed to do."

Her calculations proved right, and the couple gradually burrowed deeper and deeper until they had a cavern plunging 20ft underground.

The result is no ordinary back garden. Alongside the caves is a bridge, a waterfall, and a series of eccentric features collected from around the world, including a skeleton prop salvaged from a Hollywood film set in the US.

But the centrepiece is the cavern itself, lined with tunnels that seem to transport visitors to another world.

Although Francis said he built it as "something to do" in his spare time, it's now a popular tourist attraction. Listed under the National Garden Scheme, it regularly opens to the public and pulls in visitors from all over Britain.

Francis said, "People always say they just can't believe what they're seeing. A lot of professional gardeners have come along to have a look too."

The garden featured on Channel 4's "Amazing Spaces", fronted by presenter George Clarke, who praised Francis' vision.

It's now a shrine to Barbara, who died four years ago, with a plaque inscribed "Barbara's Garden" marking the entrance made by the same craftsmen who produced her gravestone.

A historic foundation stone anchors the site - one Francis personally tracked down and re-dedicated in her memory.

That stone once sat at Southport Hospital, laid in 1922 by the Earl of Derby. Exactly a century to the date later, it was unveiled in Francis's back garden as a memorial to the woman who made the impossible possible.

Despite the flood of attention, Francis never set out to wow the public. He said, "We had no intention of building this for anyone else's benefit; it was just something I worked on in my spare time with the help of others.

"It was something to do that I enjoyed. 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.

"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. It was because of her knowledge."