The Cornish Miner Who Tunnelled the Rock of Gibraltar

25 June 2026

How a half suffocated Cornish miner accidentally cut Gibraltar's most famous gun galleries, and what reward he really got for it.

A dozen men were dying of their own gunpowder smoke inside the Rock of Gibraltar, and the hole they cut to save their lungs 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 miner turned soldier named Henry Ince led his choking party further into the mountain than anyone had ever gone before.

Most visitors walk the Great Siege Tunnels in twenty cool, echoing minutes. They photograph the black cannon, peer through the gun ports at the airport runway and the isthmus far below, and move on to the next stop on the Upper Rock. Very few pause to learn that this whole network began as one man's idea, scratched out of the living rock with crowbars and gunpowder, or that its most celebrated feature was a happy accident born of near disaster.

A garrison under siege

To understand Ince you first have to understand the desperation around him. The Great Siege of Gibraltar ran from the summer of 1779 to February 1783, roughly three years and seven months, making it the longest siege in British history. A British garrison of a little over five thousand men, under Governor General George Augustus Eliott, held the Rock against far larger Spanish and French forces, enduring scurvy, hunger and relentless bombardment.

The crisis came in September 1782, when the Rock was pounded from the land and from a fleet of specially built floating batteries mounting well over a hundred heavy guns. Eliott's gunners answered with heated shot, set the batteries ablaze, and broke the assault. The defence held, but every clever advantage mattered, and one stubborn problem had nagged at the defenders for months.

The problem of the Notch

On the sheer northern face of the Rock there was a natural projection the soldiers called the Notch. From up there, guns could command the entire North Front and the narrow neck of land linking Gibraltar to Spain. The trouble was simple and maddening: there was no way to haul cannon up to it across the open, fire swept cliff. Governor Eliott is said to have offered a reward to anyone who could solve it.

The answer came from Sergeant Major Henry Ince of the Company of Soldier Artificers, a unit raised in 1772 that was a forerunner of today's Royal Engineers. Ince was no career staff officer. Born around 1736, he had worked with his hands before he enlisted, and he understood rock the way few soldiers did. His idea was bold to the point of madness: do not climb the cliff, tunnel through it. The work was begun under the direction of a Royal Engineer, Lieutenant Evelegh, but the hands on the tools, and the imagination behind the scheme, were Ince's.

One man looked at an impossible cliff and proposed going straight through the mountain instead of over it.

Cut by hand, fired by powder

Work began on 25 May 1782. Ince led a party of around a dozen miners who attacked the limestone with sledgehammers, crowbars and gunpowder charges, advancing slowly through the heart of the Rock. There were no machines, no compressed air, no electric light. Every foot of gallery was won by hand, in heat and dust, by men who knew that one badly placed charge could bring the roof down on them.

Progress was measured but real. By the time the siege ended in February 1783 the first gallery, named the Windsor Gallery, ran roughly 370 feet through the Rock and carried four guns. That was the very first tunnel ever cut into Gibraltar, and the seed of a network that grew steadily afterwards: under Ince's continued supervision the galleries reached close to four thousand feet by the end of the century, and far later the whole subterranean system of the Rock would stretch to many miles. It all traces back to this one tunnel and one Cornishman's idea.

The accident that made the gun galleries

Here is the detail the crowds almost never hear. As the miners pushed deeper, the smoke and fumes from the blasting had nowhere to escape and very nearly suffocated them. To clear the air, they hacked an opening out through the side of the Rock to the open face of the cliff, simply as a ventilation shaft.

When they looked at the hole they had made, they realised something. That vent, punched through the limestone to let the smoke out, framed a clean line of fire onto the ground below. It made an ideal embrasure for a cannon. So they mounted a gun there at once, without even waiting to reach the Notch, and cut more embrasures along the way. What had started as a plain transit tunnel became a line of gun galleries firing through the cliff face itself.

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 today

The original plan was to reach the Notch and mount a single 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. Instead of a lone gun on an exposed crag, they hollowed the Notch itself into a broad chamber they named St George's Hall, later fitted with seven gun positions to sweep a wide arc across the isthmus below.

The cannon you see in the tunnels now are not the originals. During the nineteenth century the early pieces were replaced with heavier rifled muzzle loaders on iron carriages, and several of these still stand at the embrasures. Gibraltar's gunners were also famous for an ingenious depression carriage that let a gun fire steeply downwards from the heights, exactly the problem the tunnels were built to solve. If you want the wider story of the limestone these tunnels run through, our Rock of Gibraltar guide sets the scene.

Land, a commission and a difficult horse

Ince did not go unrewarded, though the rewards came slowly and were more modest than legend sometimes suggests. During the siege he had used a plot of ground on the western slope to grow food, as soldiers were encouraged to do, and afterwards he was allowed to rent that land on a long lease. The location is still known today as Ince's Farm, a small but genuine corner of Gibraltar that carries his name more than two centuries later. It was a leasehold with conditions attached, not an outright gift, but the name has outlasted every formality.

The commission came later still. Ince was made an ensign in 1796 and promoted to lieutenant in 1801, roughly fourteen to nineteen years after the tunnelling, a remarkable rise for a man who had begun as a working tradesman and climbed to senior non-commissioned rank. It was recognition earned over a lifetime of service, not an instant prize handed down the moment the smoke cleared.

Then there is the horse, the detail visitors love most, and the truth is gently funnier than the romance. Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the father of the future Queen Victoria, was governor of Gibraltar in the early 1800s. Riding out one day, he overtook Ince ambling along on an old nag, remarked that the animal was too poor for a man of his worth, and presented him with a fine and valuable steed. The gift, the story goes, proved too spirited for the elderly Ince to manage, and he quietly went back to his old horse. A Cornish tradesman who carved a mountain in wartime, given a royal horse he could not ride, is a more human ending than any tidy legend.

A quick timeline of Ince and the tunnels

Walking the tunnels today

The Great Siege Tunnels sit high on the Upper Rock, well signposted within the Upper Rock Nature Reserve and reached on the same ticket as the other heritage sites. The galleries stay cool even in high summer, the floor is uneven in places, and the views through the embrasures across the airport runway and the frontier are genuinely startling. Stand at one of those gun ports and you are looking out through an opening that a dozen men cut, by hand, in a war, while gasping for air.

Aim to walk slowly. The information panels tell the military story well, but knowing about Ince and his suffocating miners changes how the place feels. You stop seeing a tourist attraction and start seeing a workplace: exhausted men carving a mountain by candlelight, never quite sure the roof would hold. Keep an eye out too for the Barbary macaques on the drive up; our guide to Gibraltar's monkeys explains how to enjoy them safely.

Building a full Upper Rock heritage day

Ince's tunnels are best experienced as part of a single, well paced day on the heights rather than a rushed dash. Pair the Great Siege Tunnels with the WWII Tunnels, an entirely separate network cut a century and a half later, when Gibraltar became an underground city of hospitals, bakeries, power stations and stores. The contrast is the whole point: the same instinct to dig into the Rock, two very different wars.

Then drop down to the Moorish Castle, whose Tower of Homage reminds you that Gibraltar's military story runs centuries deeper than the Great Siege. Add St Michael's Cave or the Skywalk if time allows. To weave all of this into a longer trip, our 48 hours in Gibraltar itinerary shows how the Upper Rock fits alongside the town, the marina and a proper lunch.

Plan your visit from a comfortable base

A day spent inside the Rock leaves your legs aching and your head full of gunpowder and accidental embrasures, and the best end to it is a short trip back down to somewhere genuinely restful. Victory Suites sits on Devils Tower Road, about a ten minute walk from Grand Casemates Square and only minutes from Gibraltar International Airport, which puts the cable car queue and the Upper Rock ticket office within easy reach of breakfast. Cook a late supper in your own full kitchen after a long climb, ease the day's walking out of your legs in the indoor pool, keep your training honest in the gym, and let our team map your route through the Great Siege Tunnels, the WWII Tunnels and St George's Hall so you spend the morning following Ince into the mountain rather than puzzling over which gate to start from. With more than 100 serviced apartments, it is an easy, comfortable home on the Rock for travellers who want to take their history slowly. Book direct and stay a few steps from the story.