On the way up, Adams told me what had happened to the main tunnel and shaft after the workings were finally stopped by the Board of Trade. "Everything stopped dead at the tunnel workings until 1892," Adams said. "By then, Sir Edward Watkin knew he was beaten on the Channel tunnel, so he tried a different kind of tunneling, and the South-Eastern Railway engineers began boring for coal a matter of a few yards away from the tunnel shaft. They went down to 2,222 feet with their boring, at which level they met a four-foot seam of good-quality coal, and the company obtained authority by an act of Parliament to mine for coal under the foreshore. As for the Channel-tunnel shaft itself, it was abandoned in 1902 and filled up with breeze—ashes and slag—from the colliery, and the Number Three ventilation shaft at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff was also filled with breeze in the same year. But the colliery never paid off any better than the tunnel project. It ran into trouble around 1907 or 1908, and then the owners decided they'd have a try at getting iron ore out of the workings, and so all the mineral mining rights were bought by the Channel Steel Company, but the iron mining didn't prosper any more than the coal mining. The Channel Steel Company went into voluntary liquidation in 1952, and all the mining rights passed to the original freeholders, who are now the British Government." Adams and I climbed over a wooden fence stile, and after a couple of more minutes of uphill walking we arrived at the top of Shakespeare Cliff. We approached to a point near the edge and kneeled in the tall grass, buffeted by a strong afternoon wind that struck us squarely in the face. It was a magnificent view. The Channel lay very far below us, and although I could not see the coast of France because of the haze—Adams said that on a fine day anybody could see clearly the clock tower outside Boulogne—I could see shipping scudding along in whitecaps in the middle of the Strait. To the left of us, not far away, lay the Admiralty Pier at Dover, the one that once had the great gun which the _Illustrated London News_ had imaginatively depicted in the act of blowing the tunnel entrance to pieces at the first sign of a French invasion of England through the tunnel.