Hobby tunneling is tunnel construction as a diversion. Usually, hobby tunnelers dig their tunnels by hand, using little equipment, and some can spend years or even decades to achieve any degree of completion. In some cases tunnels have been dug secretly, and only discovered by chance.
Motivations
A tunnel is an underground passageway, dug through the surrounding soil or rock for the purpose of transport, passage or communication. Tunnel construction is a sub-discipline of civil engineering and usually the domain of engineers and construction companies. When civilians dig tunnels it may be for criminal purposes, like smuggling or hiding illegal goods, or gaining unauthorised access to an area. People may also build escape tunnels, such as those under the Berlin Wall.
Tunneling may be part of the building of underground dwellings. Subterranean construction may be done as an art form, as in the work of Ra Paulette. Dutch graphic designer Leanne Wijnsma digs short, shallow tunnels as an art form and for fun. She had dug thirteen by 2015, three at cultural festivals.
Hobby
A few people have dug tunnels as a hobby or for fun, although some have given additional reasons for their activities. Seymour Cray, for instance, said that the work of digging helped him to think about other problems, and Harrison Dyar saw digging as a form of exercise.
Some hobbyists started out constructing something useful, but continued digging after completion. This was the case with William Lyttle, who started by digging a wine cellar, and Michael Altmann, who excavated a cooling cellar for a café. A Swiss contemporary of Altmann named Peter Junker dug in his garden, searching for water, but continued digging after finding some, excavating a tunnel length of .
Others maintain that they excavated for a particular purpose, although their tunnelling effort seems out of proportion to the stated purpose. Dyar biographer Marc Epstein thinks it is mainly outsiders that desire a sense of purpose. On Dyar's tunneling for exercise reasons he says that "it’s almost unfathomable, the amount of energy it would take" and that "it still doesn’t add up".
Author Will Hunt thinks extensive tunnelling is at least part obsession. Psychiatrist Anton Tölk believes that tunnel digging can be interpreted as a desire to return to the security of the mother's womb, and that as an activity it allows contemplative satisfaction.
Notable cases
Harrison Dyar
The American entomologist Harrison Gray Dyar Jr. constructed a network of tunnels on two occasions, with a length of combined. His first, under his Washington, D.C. home was accidentally discovered during construction work in 1917, without drawing much attention. It was rediscovered in 1924, when a truck sank through the pavement nearby. The tunnel system led to speculation in the press, not in the least because many German newspapers from the war years of 1917 and 1918 were found in the tunnels. After a few days Dyar came forward as the tunnels' constructor, claiming he had dug them between 1906 and 1916, when he relocated to California.
Back in Washington a few years later, Dyar dug out a second set of tunnels under his new home. The network had concrete lined walls, steel staircases and electric lighting. Dyar described hobby tunneling as a kind of exercise for him, saying "some men play golf, I dig tunnels".
Seymour Cray
The American engineer and supercomputer architect Seymour Cray is known to have been a hobby tunneller. Cray built an cedar-floored tunnel under his house, explaining that the digging helped him to think about computer designs. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem," he said.
Lyova Arakelyan
Lyova (or Levon) Arakelyan dug a storage cellar under his house on the edge of Yerevan in 1985. When completed, he continued to dig and kept at it for some 23 years, constructing an extensive complex of tunnels, rooms and stairs which extended deep into solid rock. Arakelyan stated that he received directions for his work in dreams and visions. The underground spaces were transformed into a museum, called 'Divine Underground', after his death in 2008. Arakelyan never made any money from his tunneling in life, and the museum provides some income for his family.