http://www.williamsontunnels.co.uk/
Tycoon Joseph Williamson dug a vast, bizarre network of tunnels under Liverpool almost 200 years ago. Were they the city's first job creation scheme, a rich man's whimsy or a shelter from the end of the world?
They have been the stuff of Merseyside legend for decades but the truth is stranger than any fireside story.
Now with the opening of a section of tunnels, the public can for the first time gain access to the underground kingdom of Joseph Williamson, tobacco magnate, philanthropist, recluse and "mad mole".
Gothic arches
The portal to this subterranean realm is almost mundane: a wide, arching tunnel, looking rather like a French wine cellar, hewn out of sandstone and partly lined with brick.
But there is an eerie drip, drip of unseen water ahead and lights pick out gothic arches in the distance, giving the whole place something of a church crypt atmosphere
Between 1805 and his death in 1840, Williamson employed thousands of men digging out a network underneath land that he owned in Edge Hill.
It seems to have started logically enough - a few cellars and ground level arches behind the mansions that he was building so that the back gardens could be extended despite the sloping terrain.
But while these constructions had a purpose, the next are a puzzle.
Williamson set his gangs of men burrowing in all directions but most of the tunnels lead nowhere. Some just come to an abrupt halt, others intersect another part of the labyrinth. There are even tunnels within tunnels.
Maze
One of these double-decker tunnels makes a spectacular feature at the section of the network newly opened to the public.
The tunnels were hacked out by hand - as the pickaxe marks reveal.
According to the site's Heritage Manager, Lynn Podmore, there are even more unusual constructions to be explored.
We still don't know where each one leads, and we are finding new tunnels all the time," she says.
"There is a triple-decker tunnel under the carpark here and a completely different section has just been found up the road."
Back within the barrel-shaped chamber, the tunnel twists, turns, narrows and changes level.
Smaller tunnels and chimneys head off into the darkness.
Mapping the maze has not been easy. Williamson was notoriously secretive about his creation and no contemporary plan of the whole network survives.
Philanthropy
The lack of documentary evidence has prompted endless speculation about why the tunnels were built.
One popular theory is that he was pricked by social conscience.
In the early 19th century, men who had been fighting the Napoleonic wars were flooding back to Britain - and were in need of jobs.
Williamson, it is said, responded to the poverty around him by creating work, whether it really needed doing or not.
Another story puts the tycoon as a member of an extreme religious sect that believed that Armageddon was on the way.
The tunnels therefore were a place of sanctuary for Williamson and for fellow believers to flee to and emerge from to start a new city once God had wreaked his vengeance on the world.
A more prosaic image is of a man obsessed by his project, who, when his wife died in 1822, withdrew ever deeper into his subterranean empire, even building living rooms and a banqueting hall down there.