Cool Finds

Hidden Tunnels Dating Back to Henry VIII’s Reign Were Discovered at This English Boarding School, Where the King Once Lived

Bones, bottles and pottery were found at the New Hall School, which was once Henry VIII’s Palace of Beaulieu. Before that, Anne Boleyn’s father owned the estate

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

June 17, 2026 4:56 p.m.

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On the grounds of a storied English boarding school, workers discovered entrances to brickwork tunnels, as well as a cache of centuries-old artifacts. They date back to the Tudor era—when the schoolgrounds hosted a country estate of Henry VIII.

“Finds of this nature are exceptionally rare within a school setting, so this is particularly exciting for our students,” says Sarah Garside, head of history at the New Hall School in Chelmsford, England, in a statement. “The tunnels and artifacts offer an invaluable opportunity to connect documentary history with physical evidence.”

New Hall School was founded in what is now Belgium in 1642 as a Catholic school for girls, then was forced to relocate by the French Revolution in 1794. In 1799, the school took up residence in Essex, England—about 50 miles northeast of London—inside a building of royal caliber: the Palace of Beaulieu.

Originally, the building was called New Hall, and it belonged to nobleman Thomas Boleyn, a courtier and foreign ambassador during the 16th-century reign of Henry VIII. In the early 1500s, the king purchased the country estate from Boleyn, then spent more than £17,000 pounds to enlarge and decorate the place. Henry VIII renamed the house Beaulieu—French for “beautiful place”—and spent a great deal of time there through the 1520s, hunting and meeting with advisers.

As Time Team reported in 2009, Henry VIII didn’t like relying on English nobility to put him up—as was customary—when he traveled through the country. He collected many private estates throughout England during his reign, including Beaulieu.

“Henry’s palaces tell us a good deal about his kingship, in terms of their sheer number,” John Cooper, a historian at the University of York, told Time Team. “Henry VIII owned 55 palaces or hunting lodges by the time of his death. No English monarch, before or since, has owned so many palaces.”

Elizabeth I—the last Tudor monarch—granted the palace to earl Thomas Radclyffe in 1573, ending its royal ownership. The next couple centuries saw Beaulieu acquired by several elites, including Oliver Cromwell. By the mid-1700s, the palace was in poor condition. Only a small portion of the building now occupied by New Hall School is original to Henry VIII’s Beaulieu.

Henry VIII’s coat of arms still hangs in New Hall’s chapel. As Garside tells BBC News’ Henry Godfrey-Evans, the school is a “really unique and exciting place to teach history.”

Recently, maintenance workers were repairing the estate’s historic ha-ha—a sort of sunken fence-wall that divided the grounds into grazing fields for livestock. While working, they discovered arched entrances to what look like tunnels, embedded in the wall, as well as pottery, bones, glass bottles and lead fragments. Garside tells BBC News that the condition of the pottery indicates it’s from the Tudor era.

“We weren’t sure if it had just been disposed of down there as waste, just thrown in and then covered up,” Garside tells BBC News. “So that leads to questions of ‘Were [the tunnels] used for storage of some kind?’” She wonders whether someone placed the pottery in a tunnel to preserve it. “We don't know. … It’s a really exciting thing to explore more.”

As 17-year-old New Hall School student Anna tells BBC News, “The tunnels, especially, they add a sense of secrecy.” Her classmate Florian says, “It really does never cease to amaze you the amount of history and the sort of richness of that history that we have here.”

The school hired historians and archaeologists to continue excavating the site and exploring the tunnels, reports All That’s Interesting’s Ella Spitz. It won’t be the first time the school grounds are excavated: Oxford Archaeology performed a dig ahead of Time Team’s special report in 2009. Researchers found prehistoric pits, a medieval wall built before Henry VIII’s time and the foundations of the estate’s Tudor-era chapel.

“The uncovering of these tunnels brings history to life in a way few sites can offer,” says New Hall School principal Katherine Jeffrey in the statement. “The artifacts hint at the richness of what may lie beneath, and we are excited to continue exploring and sharing these findings.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.