A self-confessed ‘eccentric’ pensioner has spent 30 years digging a huge labyrinth of underground caves 20ft below the garden of his home.
Retired photographer Francis Proctor, 76, from Southport, took three decades to complete his passion project as the entire network was hand-dug by him using spades and shovels.
Mr Proctor, who first purchased his house with his late wife Barbara, more than 50 years ago, initially just wanted to create one room.
He said: ‘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 Mr Proctor’s late wife Barbara, a mathematician and statistician, had other ideas.
He 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 Mr Proctor 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.
Mr Proctor 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 the pensioner’s vision.
Mr Proctor has now converted the caverns into a space of remembrance to his late wife, who died four years ago, with a plaque inscribed ‘Barbara’s Garden’ marking the entrance.
The plaque was 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 attention from around the world, Mr Proctor said he never set out to wow the public.
‘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.’