Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Lowlands and Borders
Date 2007
Event ID 589240
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/589240
Cove Harbour, now little used, was completed in 1831. It has two masonry piers forming an entrance about 50 ft
wide with the North Sea and enclosing an area of three acres. Earlier piers, vestiges of which still exist, were
destroyed in storms, but a notable tunnel made through a spur of rock in ca.1752 remains, although somewhat
distorted in parts by recent safeguarding measures. It was formed as part of a harbour improvement by Sir
John Hall of Dunglass to give safe access to the beach. As the road from Cove nears the harbour, a rock cutting
32 ft long on the right leads to the tunnel entrance. The tunnel is 183 ft in length and slopes down 20 ft. Its first
20 ft from the road is built in rubble masonry with an arched roof and is 814 ft wide and 1012 ft high. Beyond this to the harbour, the tunnel is cut through the natural sandstone. It was originally 10 ft square at the beach end (at cliff base at left-hand edge of the view), near which it connects via an iron door with an elaborate system of disused storage cellars hewn out of the rock. The contractor was Stephen Redpath and the principal mason John Brown. Gunpowder was used to make the tunnel. Labourers were paid from 5d to 6d per day and excavation cost from 7s 6d to 10s per cubic fathom. This pre-canal age tunnel, one of the earliest in Britain in a context other than mining, is indicative of the spirit of commercial enterprise stirring in Scotland at the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
R Paxton and S Shipway 2007
Reproduce from 'Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Lowlands and Borders' with kind permission of Thomas Telford Publishers.
