Lewes: the Cuilfail Tunnel

A few months ago I moved to East Sussex and now live just outside the county town of Lewes. I was born and brought up over the border in West Sussex – and grew up with the slightly odd idea that West was best. Because I’m here in Lewes, I thought it was time to learn slightly more about the East; my new home. And I’m going to start by heading underground.

The Cuilfail Tunnel is the single reason that many people don’t visit Lewes, because it allows traffic on the busy A27 to bypass the town. It’s around 430 metres long, boring through a chalk hillside between the eastern edge of Lewes and the roundabout south of me at Southerham.

The tunnel was officially opened in December 1980, although it’s part of a traffic planning process that started before the Second World War and involved a couple of angry public inquiries in 1964 and 1972. The bypass itself was started in 1975, with work on the tunnel beginning a few years later.

Today, the tunnel is having more than £2 million of government money spent on renovating it. There’s new cladding and new lighting going inside, which will apparently help to reduce future maintenance costs. It may not be pretty but it’s a welcome alternative to the original plan from the 1970s, which would have seen all the houses demolished along one side of South Street.

The tunnel gets its name from the Cuilfail area of Lewes, although it’s not a local name. Just over a hundred years ago the land above the tunnel, which is now a golf course, was owned by a local solicitor who named it after a house he owned in Scotland. Apparently the Gaelic root means "Shelter” or “Retreat”.

And the tunnel’s not the only modern landmark in the area. At the Lewes end of the tunnel is a spiral sculpture of Portland Stone that suggests a giant ammonite fossil – the kind of thing you might find in the chalk that the tunnel cuts through. It was created by Peter Randall-Page and was placed here in 1983 to mark the tunnel’s opening. Locally it’s often called the snail – perhaps an appropriate metaphor for the state of local traffic if the tunnel wasn’t here.