As part of unpublished Turner research informed by local knowledge, Dr Bernard Richards originally suggested
1 that the tunnels in this sketch, inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, are associated with the Dudley Canal, though the inscription ‘Lime’ at the bottom left perhaps indicates that the scene shows the intensive limestone workings on nearby Wren’s Nest Hill, north of Dudley. There is a chimney, apparently issuing thick smoke, in the distance. Derek Gittings, of the Dudley Canal and Tunnel Trust, has since observed that ‘there are no canal tunnels that opened to the surface on the Wren’s Nest Hill’ itself, although ‘there are several features in the sketch that suggest that it may show the northern portal of the Dudley Canal Tunnel on Dudley Castle Hill’, not far east of the Wren’s Nest and immediately to the west of the Canal Trust’s headquarters off Birmingham New Road:
As with the Wren’s Nest hill, there were extensive limestone workings here. In particular, the sketch [appears to show] two small tunnel entrances to the left of the main tunnel and a structure on the hill above them. There were two limekilns here, fed from the top, with the burnt lime extracted from two arched openings in the tunnel portal wall at the bottom and loaded onto boats. Although the surface works were destroyed when a railway was built in the 1850s, the two arched entrances to the kilns are still there today.
At the bottom left of the sketch there are a number of structures showing tall arched entrances. A row of limekilns were built on this site and their remains can still be seen today.
2Mr Gillings continues: ‘to the immediate left of the canal tunnel entrance in the Turner sketch there appears to be a tall structure. This could be the protruding buttress in the tunnel portal wall which is still present today. The tunnel entrance itself was re-built in blue brick in the 1850s when a railway was built over it.’ He has described the setting as it now appears: ‘The two openings to the left of the canal tunnel can [still] be seen’; to their left, a ‘wooded area hides the remains of a row of limekilns’, although ‘part of the original façade’ remains evident.
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