The walls were lined with pictures, but photographs rather than paintings like upstairs. Nearest him, in the corner, was an old framed map of the town and the surrounding countryside. He had seen it on the web the night before and could trace the thin baby blue line of the Huddersfield Narrow through Marsden until it disappeared completely into the Standedge Tunnel. The map covered the whole of the tunnel and he saw the tracks of the three tunnels running either side of it. The railway line that he had just been on, the one adjacent to it and the disused railway tunnel to the left. The canal tunnel ran for a distance, and eventually came out in the neighboring town of Diggle. Just viewing it on the map, Standedge seemed to stretch on forever.

Next to the map was a photo of a landscape Robin didn’t recognize, but he guessed it was somewhere local. It was a rural landscape, a hill silhouetted by a cloudy sky. As he looked closer, he saw two white smudges at the top of the hill with black faces and legs. Two sheep. Was it possible that they were the same ones he met on his way here? Robin smiled at that.

There was an old detailed illustration of workmen in Standedge, chipping away at rock and loading boats with waste. There was a small plaque next to it, with some information:

Standedge Canal Tunnel: At 16,499 feet long and

636 feet deep at its lowest point,
Standedge is the longest
and deepest canal tunnel in the United Kingdom.
It stands as an incredible feat of British engineering
and construction.

Another illustration caught his eye. It looked more like a schematic, showing a drawn overhead view of the entire tunnel. In the almost-exact center of the tunnel was an S-shaped configuration. Something jogged in Robin’s memory, something he had skimmed over but found slightly amusing. When the tunnel was built, it was started from both ends, but was woefully miscalculated. Thus when the two workforces got to the middle, the tunnel didn’t meet. A slight deviation had to be made to get the tunnel to join up.

Robin could see why the tunnel was a tourist attraction—it was indeed an impressive thing, but the question for him wasn’t why anyone would go through the tunnel. It was why Matthew and his friends did.