Category Archives: Below


Nooting Hill

Soon to be Melbourne’s next big housing estate, for a brief period Lilydale Quarry was the world’s largest macro-mini-golf course.

The history of the quarry is quite fascinating too, it’s the reason Puffing Billy was built (to collect wood to feed the limestone kilns), it’s the reason Lilydale has a train station (to get the lumber to the Quary), and a large number of Melbourne’s iconic limestone buildings, from the Supreme Court to Fed Square are made from materials removed from the Cave Hill site.

Giant limestone bunkers, conveyors, drivable dump trucks, caves, a gaping hole to drive golf balls into, secret tunnels, and a layout about as well planned out as Rollercoaster Tycoon world; a giant playground was left behind.



Huge Abandoned Mine Works

12 hour underground jaunt in over 40Km of huge abandoned mine works? Sure, why not. In fact, why don’t we just drive in?

This mine produced limestone, but limestone that could take a shine. Like a cheap version of marble. Countless monuments and many notable buildings are made of products mined from this site. Later years saw the facility extracting stone, and processed underground in an  a unique underground plant.

Now it sits quietly in the country side, two giant doors in the side of a mountain, concealing the largest adit we’ve ever seen.


Mini Dreadnought

In a little hut is a little hatch. Lift out the plate and drop down into the darkness.

My favourite places are ones you don’t expect. An unassuming concrete hut in a paddock. Mini Dreadnought isn’t stormwater drain or sewerage retarding system, but rather an oil storage reservoir for a long gone facility.


Paris Catacombs

Below the streets of Paris in the Catacombs is an explorer’s wet dream. (Wet in that you’re between knee and ankle deep for hours on end.)

Starting in the late 1700s, officials in Paris were faced with the growing problem of overflowing cemeteries. In May 1780 a property adjoining a cemetery in the center of Paris had a nasty surprise. The wall of their basement collapsed and the bodies packed into the mass graves at the cemetery next door, overflowed into their basement.

A Parisian policeman who’d previously been tasked with starting the mine inspection service, suggested using the vast network of mines and quarries below the city to store the human remains. By re-purposing the quarries and mines of Paris as an ossuary, the Paris Catacombs began.

The first few years of operations saw the catacombs used as a bone dumping ground, but soon the head of the Paris Mine Inspection Service undertook renovations that would transform the underground caverns into a visitable mausoleum. However the ossuary is only a small part of the sprawling network of tunnels reffed to as the “Catacombs”.

Armed with energy drinks, snacks and torches we headed through abandoned subway lines to reach our entry to the Catacombs. That began a 12 hour trape through the vast network tunnels that serve as the final resting place of 6 million Parisians.

The catacombs are more than just a home to dead folk. It’s a home to statues carved out of the soft rock, cataphiles, miniature cities etched into the clay, dumped bicycles, telephone lines, glimpses up to the city above, and, if you know where to look, still a butt ton of bones…