News: When is a hole more than just a hole?

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The cliff tops and coastline of the UK are littered with holes and hidden tunnels which can, from time to time, appear in the ground, raising all kinds of issues and potential problems. When a location along the south coast of Eastern Kent, famous for stories of smuggling and contraband, discovered a new and large hole on public land, the call came to Arrow Geophysics to reveal what lay beneath.

Tim Archer, MD of Arrow Geophysics, takes up the story, “When a hole appears in a cliff top it can be a crack which fades away, an old mine or smugglers tunnel, or just a fissure made by nature. At Arrow Geophysics we use geophysical techniques to identify what the hole has yet to reveal and also how sturdy the remaining ground around a hole is, so that options can be analysed by civil engineers.”

The importance of knowing the data is that any remedial or capping work has to be based on solid ground around a hole, which can often mean digging back from the edge with heavy machinery. The weight of such machinery has to be supported by the ground around the hole, so the survey also has to look at how solid the rock is for a significant area around the hole itself. Arrow Geophysics came in and revealed, after a few complex days of surveying, that the hole was likely to be an as yet unknown smugglers tunnel accessing a nearby pub and that it fell all the way to a neighbouring beach.

“The result of our work is that a series of viable choices can now be discussed by the civil engineers as to how the tunnel should be handled and what happens next”, said Tim Archer. “And we got to walk along a tunnel that was once used by smugglers centuries ago. A great job for Arrow Geophysics”.

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