Secret tunnel to reopen after being hidden for 50 years

A secret tunnel in the Surrey Hills linked to prominent 19th Century mathematician Ada Lovelace is to reopen after lying hidden for five decades.

The subterranean passage was part of Horsley Towers in Leatherhead, a grand mansion once lived in by Lovelace, also the only legitimate child of scandalous 19th Century poet Lord Byron.

Used daily as a goods entrance by servants and tradespeople in the 1800s, the tunnel has remained unseen since the 1970s.

With Horsley Towers now a historic country house hotel called the De Vere Horsley Estate, the reopening will be marked by a special celebration on 28 March.

Set within 50 acres, Horsley Towers was designed in 1820 for the banker William Currie by acclaimed architect Sir Charles Barry, who created the Houses of Parliament.

Following Currie's death in 1829, it was bought by William King-Noel, the 1st Earl of Lovelace, who married the then Ada Byron six years later.

Lovelace was taught science and mathematics from a young age, at the insistence of her mother Anne Isabella Milbanke - a rare thing for women at that time.

Subsequently striking up a friendship with Charles Babbage, an inventor and mechanical engineer, Lovelace would become fascinated with his plans to build a complicated calculating machine.

Although Babbage's design was never fully realised, her contributions to the project led to her being credited as pioneering a very early kind of computer programming.

Lovelace's notes even inspired Alan Turing's work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.

The estate later passed to aviation pioneer, Thomas Sopwith, in 1919, and by the 1960s, the tunnel had been repurposed to provide road access through the estate to the Horsley Towers courtyard.

Michael Micallef, general manger at De Vere Horsley Estate, said: "Reopening this historic tunnel is a wonderful opportunity.

"We're proud to finally bring a hidden piece of our heritage back into the spotlight."

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