yeah, a few times going through the tunnel i've tried to look up the shafts through the window, you can see the brickwork, and sometimes the train's going so fast it seems like you've seen the sky. it's strange to think that much light is coming through a hole nearly 100m deep. until they completely reengineered the drainage and trackbed a few years ago the trains had to crawl through at half the speed, it's a shame that i only occasionally paid so much attention back then. i've always enjoyed trying to get glimpses of the switchboxes and signal cables from the train lights on the way through tunnels. and i noticed as we were coming back the other day there seems to be a much longer gap between the light gaps at the leeds end.
the map is explorer 297 from 2004 (lower wharfedale and washburn valley). i'm a little unsure whether the marking is in fact a tunnel or an unfenced track as the markings are identical however as it runs directly into the drainage beck it seems perfectly reasonable that it could be a drainage tunel, and there certainly seemed to be nothing in the area that deserved the marking of unfenced track rather than simply a path. it diverts from the main tunnel at a sharp angle just under the last street on the edge of pannal and runs for about 1800 feet under the woods parralel to the main tunnel on the east. there is a sharp ridge along the line which may well be a spoil heap, but we could find no evidence of a distinct entrance as it seems to just run into a wooded hill in the grounds of creskeld hall, which has no obvious signs of being man-made.
i've never heard of anything about walking through tunnels on christmas day in 23 years of local news and papers, but i suppose anything's possible around christmas and new year. we walked all the way up to the old reservoir above todmorden on the edge of saddleworth moor the day after new years day because we heard that people go skinny dipping in it, but after we got up there, found no-one but a rambler walking a dog, and smoking a few fags sat on the stonework and freezing our tits off before climbing back down, we found out that someone had misread the paper and it was the day after.