Garden Shaft →
Before Nolan's Cross: Temple Beeld Cross
On a hilltop in the North Yorkshire Moors, on documented Templar land, stands a formation of five...
A Searcher Shaft That Turned Out Too Old
The show reported that the Garden Shaft was found in 2017 and read, at first, as an 80-foot searcher shaft of the 19th century. That reading held until the Lagina team's water testing returned some of the highest gold readings on the island from water in and around the shaft. Wood from the lining at the 80-foot mark was then carbon dated, and the show reported a date of about 1735, roughly 60 years before the Money Pit was discovered. If that date holds, the shaft predates every recorded search. Drilling in 2022 added a second reason: boreholes to the south kept meeting wood at about 103 feet, sonar mapped a timbered tunnel trending toward the shaft, and a shallower run of wood at about 95 feet to the west appeared to pass directly beneath it.
Dumas Rebuilds It, Eight Feet at a Time
Dumas Contracting, a mining contractor, arrived in December 2022 to drain the shaft, remove the backfill, reline it with waterproofed timber, grout the surrounding ground, and set platforms every eight feet to about 80 feet. Three weeks in, the Nova Scotia government stopped the work, ruling that it needed mining permits rather than the rehabilitation authorization Dumas held. Work resumed in February 2023 with a 109-ton crane and a three-ton hammer grab, and by May 2023 the shaft stood rebuilt to 82 feet.
Ninety-Five Feet and a Floor of Timbers
Permits to deepen the shaft came through in Season 11, in late 2023. Water entered near 87 feet, a storm put 30 feet of water in the shaft, and for weeks an inflow at about 66 feet, where photographs showed a small cavern packed with old planks, kept the crew from going deeper. Dumas sealed the voids behind the wall with expanding urethane and Geofoam and regained control early in 2024. The show reported the tunnel reached at 95 feet, and the shaft was carried on to 99 feet to expose it. Only the floor timbers survived; no roof or side members were found in place, and the team concluded the tunnel had collapsed or been partly dismantled. Carbon dating of the tunnel wood, as reported in Season 11, gave a primary range of 1631 to 1684, with a 34 percent probability of 1735 to 1803. The landing was then moved down to 102 feet, with a target of 106 feet before horizontal drilling.
Salt Water at 106 Feet
Probe drilling at the 106-foot level met a sudden rush of salt water. The Dumas crew got out safely, and Rick Lagina, who with his brother Marty Lagina has led the search since 2006, tasted the water and confirmed it was salty. The show gave the inflow as 479 gallons per minute in Season 11 and as 700 gallons per minute when it looked back in Season 12. Pumping sand-laden water threatened the shaft, and horizontal drilling was abandoned. A borehole eight feet northwest of the shaft then came up through fine sand, and Craig Tester, the engineer and partner in the Lagina venture, argued that such sand could not pass 479 gallons a minute and that the water must have an outside source, possibly a flood tunnel. Seasons 12 and 13 worked around the shaft rather than in it: dye injected 200 feet down in the solution channel to the south turned up at 105 feet near the shaft, which Ian Spooner, the geoscientist who runs the team's water testing, read as metals being carried north from deep in the channel.
What the Record Supports
The record supports a timber shaft whose wood was dated by carbon to about 1735, a tunnel beneath it with timbers dated as early as the 1600s, gold traces in water and wood, and a saltwater inflow at 106 feet strong enough to stop the work. The dates are carbon dates reported on the show, each a probability range rather than a single year. The record does not say who dug the shaft, where the tunnel led, or whether the water came through a built flood tunnel or through natural channels in the sand and bedrock.
