The Cornish Miner Who Tunnelled the Rock of Gibraltar

25 June 2026 Last checked 2026-06-25

Thirteen men cut 82 feet in five weeks, and the hole they blasted to stop suffocating became the fortress's most photographed feature. What Ince really got.

Thirteen men took five weeks to cut the first tunnel into the Rock of Gibraltar, and the hole they punched through the cliff to stop themselves suffocating became the most photographed feature in the whole fortress.

That is not a flourish. It is near enough what happened in the summer of 1782, deep in the limestone of the North Face, while a Cornish nailor turned miner turned soldier named Henry Ince led his choking party further into the mountain than anyone had gone before.

Most visitors walk the Great Siege Tunnels in twenty cool, echoing minutes. They photograph the black cannon, look out through the gun ports at the runway and the isthmus below, and move on. Very few learn that the whole network began as one sergeant major's idea, or that its best known feature was an accident.

The siege that made the tunnels necessary

The Great Siege of Gibraltar began on 24 June 1779, the birthday of King George III, and ran until the truce in early February 1783. That is three years and seven months, and the Gibraltar National Museum calls it the longest siege in British military history. Sources differ on the exact finish: the museum dates the truce to 2 February 1783, while other accounts give 7 February. We have not found a single document that settles it, so we give both.

The size of the garrison is also reported differently depending on who is counting, and it is worth knowing that before you repeat a number. The museum puts the defenders at about 7,000 against roughly 40,000 French and Spanish troops. Other accounts put the British force closer to 5,000. Either way the arithmetic was poor, and the governor, General George Augustus Eliott, held the Rock through scurvy, hunger and years of bombardment.

The crisis came on 13 September 1782. The attackers brought ten purpose built floating batteries, heavy sailing vessels with thick protected sides, planned by Colonel D'Arcon under the Duc de Crillon. British fire at first did little. Then the gunners began heating shot in a furnace, and red hot iron set the two main vessels alight by late afternoon. By one in the morning the batteries were abandoned and the rest were burned so they could not be taken.

The problem of the Notch

On the sheer north face there was a natural projection the soldiers called the Notch. Guns up there would command the entire North Front and the narrow neck of land joining Gibraltar to Spain. The problem was simple and maddening: there was no way to haul a cannon up an open, fire swept cliff.

Eliott offered a reward to anyone who could solve it. The answer came from Sergeant Major Henry Ince of the Soldier Artificer Company, the unit raised in 1772 that was a forerunner of the Royal Engineers. His proposal was blunt to the point of madness: do not climb the cliff, go through the mountain.

The plan was approved and Colonel Green's order of 22 May 1782 put the work under Ince's direction. Excavation began three days later, on 25 May 1782. Note what that means. The scheme was not handed to a commissioned engineer with Ince labouring beneath him: the order placed the tunnelling under the sergeant major himself, which in the eighteenth century British Army was not how things usually went.

One man looked at an impossible cliff and proposed going straight through the mountain instead of over it. The army, to its credit, let him.

Cut by hand, fired by powder

There were no machines, no compressed air and no electric light. The miners went at the limestone with sledgehammers, crowbars and gunpowder, and every foot was won by hand in heat and dust by men who knew a badly placed charge could bring the roof down.

The pace is the part that surprises people. Thirteen men took five weeks to drive a tunnel 82 feet long. That is a little over two feet a day, through solid rock, with hand tools. By the end of 1783 the galleries totalled about 908 feet. By 1790, under Ince's continued supervision, roughly 4,000 feet had been cut. The vast subterranean system people associate with Gibraltar today grew from that first 82 feet.

The Gibraltar Nature Reserve, which runs the site, notes that the tunnels were first dug to move armaments across the Rock out of the besiegers' line of fire, and were expanded after the siege and again in the Second World War. The instinct never changed. When Gibraltar had a problem, it dug.

The accident that made the gun galleries

Here is the detail the crowds almost never hear. Blasting underground produced smoke and fumes with nowhere to go, and the air in the workings became close to unbreathable. So the miners blasted a horizontal shaft out to the open cliff face, purely to let the smoke escape.

One charge was unusually large, and the smoke pouring out of the new vent was visible to the enemy below. That is when somebody realised what they had made. The opening framed a clean line of fire onto the Spanish works. The inner section was enlarged to take the recoil, a 24 pounder was mounted in it, and the ventilation hole became a gun position without ever having been designed as one.

More embrasures followed along the gallery, overlooking the Spanish lines. What had been planned as a transit tunnel to reach the Notch turned into a line of gun galleries firing through the cliff face itself. The Gibraltar National Museum records that the upper galleries eventually held 17 guns covering the northern approaches.

The most photographed feature of the tunnels began life as nothing grander than a vent for the smoke.

St George's Hall, and the guns you see now

The original object was to reach the Notch and put one gun on top of it. By the time the diggers got there in the summer of 1783 the siege was over and a better idea had taken hold. Rather than a lone gun on an exposed crag, they hollowed the Notch itself into a broad chamber, named it St George's Hall, and it was later fitted with seven gun positions sweeping the isthmus below.

The cannon in the tunnels today are not the siege pieces. During the nineteenth century the early guns were replaced with heavier rifled muzzle loaders on iron carriages, and several still stand at the embrasures. Gibraltar's gunners were also known for the depression carriage, which let a gun fire steeply downwards from a height: precisely the problem the tunnels were cut to solve. For the wider story of the limestone these galleries run through, our Rock of Gibraltar guide sets the scene.

What Ince actually got for it

The legend says Ince was richly rewarded. The record is thinner and more interesting, and this is where most retellings start inventing.

Eliott had offered a bounty of 1,000 dollars. Whether Ince ever received it is not clear from the sources, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A family tradition holds that he was paid a guinea for every running foot of tunnel, which would have been a considerable sum, but a family tradition is not a receipt. If you see a page stating flatly what he was paid, ask where it got that.

What is documented is the land. In January 1787, four years after the siege, he was granted a plot on the Queen's Road for 41 years at a rent of 12 reals a month, on condition that he fenced it and planted lemon trees. The lease was renewed for 66 years in January 1803. That plot is still called Ince's Farm. It was a conditional leasehold with a rent and a gardening obligation attached, not a gift of an estate, and the name has outlasted every formality in it.

The commission came later still, and slowly. Ince was discharged from the company in 1791 but stayed on as overseer of the mines. He was commissioned ensign on 2 February 1796 and promoted lieutenant on 24 March 1801, after the governor blocked a posting that would have sent him to the Channel Islands. That is fourteen to nineteen years after the tunnelling, for a man who had started as a tradesman.

The horse, and the line that ends the story

Then there is the horse, the detail visitors love most, and the real version is better than the tidy one. Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the father of the future Queen Victoria, was governor of Gibraltar in the early 1800s. He saw Ince on a worn out old animal and replaced it with a far finer horse.

The usual retelling stops there, or has Ince meekly going back to his old nag. By one account what actually happened is that Ince admitted he could not handle the animal and asked to return it, and the Duke told him to put the horse in his pocket instead. Ince took the hint and sold it for doubloons. A Cornish tradesman who carved a mountain in wartime, given a royal horse he could not ride and quietly told to cash it, is a more human ending than any legend.

Ince served 36 years in Gibraltar. He went home to England in 1804 and died at Gittisham in Devon on 9 October 1808, aged 72. He was born in Penzance in 1736 and worked as a nailor before he ever went near a mine.

A timeline of Ince and the tunnels

Walking the tunnels today

The Great Siege Tunnels sit high on the Upper Rock inside the Gibraltar Nature Reserve, signposted and reached on the same reserve ticket as the other heritage sites. Official reserve prices are 30 GBP for an adult, meaning anyone over 11, and 22 GBP for a child aged 5 to 11, with under fives free. The galleries stay cool even in August and the floor is uneven in places.

One warning that the official page gives and most guides leave out: the tunnels are not recommended for visitors with limited mobility, because of the steep incline down to the far end and back up to the exit. The reserve says the heritage value of the site prevents the extensive works that would fix it. If someone in your group struggles with slopes, plan around that rather than finding out at the entrance.

Getting up there has also changed. The cable car stopped carrying passengers on 18 November 2025 and the reserve expects it to reopen in 2027, so the ways up are now on foot, about an hour of steady climbing from town, or by licensed taxi tour. Our guide to the closure gives the costs of each.

Stand at one of those gun ports and you are looking out through an opening that thirteen men cut by hand, in a war, while gasping for air. Walk it slowly. The panels tell the military story well, but knowing about Ince changes what you are looking at: not an attraction, a workplace, where exhausted men carved a mountain by candlelight without being sure the roof would hold. Watch for the macaques on the way up, and our guide to Gibraltar's monkeys explains how to enjoy them without losing anything.

Building a full Upper Rock heritage day

The obvious pairing is the WWII Tunnels, a separate network cut a century and a half later, when the Rock became an underground city of hospitals, bakeries, power stations and stores. The contrast is the point: the same instinct to dig, two very different wars.

One honest caveat before you plan around it. We could not confirm from the reserve's own pages whether the WWII Tunnels are covered by the standard reserve ticket or need a separate booking or guided tour, and the accounts circulating online contradict each other. Ask the reserve directly when you buy, rather than trusting any page that states it confidently, including the ones that disagree with each other.

Then drop down to the Moorish Castle, whose Tower of Homage is a reminder that Gibraltar's military story runs centuries deeper than the Great Siege. Add St Michael's Cave, or the Skywalk, which is capped at 50 visitors at a time and rewards an early start. To fit all this into a longer trip, our 48 hours in Gibraltar itinerary places the Upper Rock alongside the town and the marina.

A base at the bottom of the hill

A day inside the Rock leaves your legs aching and your head full of gunpowder and accidental embrasures, and it matters more than it used to where you end it, because you are walking up and down rather than riding.

Victory Suites is a purpose built apart hotel on Devils Tower Road, about ten minutes on foot from Grand Casemates Square and three minutes from the airport terminal, which puts the Upper Rock entrances within reach of breakfast rather than an hour of transport. Cook a late supper in a full kitchen after a long climb, use the indoor pool to get the day's walking out of your legs and the gym if you still have anything left, and ask the team which gate to start from so you spend the morning following Ince into the mountain instead of working out the route. There are 100+ serviced apartments, rates step down at seven nights and again at a month, and we take bookings direct as well as through 300+ booking channels.