Abandoned underground bomb storage

 (Disclaimer: Joking aside, I fully understand the risks/dangers involved in these adventures and do so in the full knowledge of what could happen. I don't encourage or condone and I accept no responsibility for anyone else following in my footsteps. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, I never take any items and I never cause any damage, as such no criminal offences have been committed in the making of this blog. I will not disclose location or means of entry.  I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.

This is probably one of my favourite places ever. It's got a cool history, it's underground, it's gigantic, it's about as safe as letting Kate McCann babysit your kids, and the archways protruding from the landscape are slightly reminscent of the Autobots headquarters in the old Transformers cartoon. What more could I ask for? 

Basically what we're looking at here is a giant wartime bomb storage facility. 

At the far end of this big rectangular pit, the surrounding slate was sloped sufficiently to allow access, although this hasn't always been the case. Look closely and you'll be able to see the original access tunnels. All of this was once underground. Rewind to 1941, and one would be walking across a relatively flat expanse, unaware of what was going on underfoot. Skip ahead to 1942 and one would want to stand clear because the roof came crashing down. Oops. From up here, it's still possible to see the lines across the floor that would have been different storage bay areas.

There's my accomplice Jess down below to give some indication of size. (Jess is ordinary human size, and not a borrower.)

I'll start with the "official" entry tunnels.

This was apparently a standard-guage railway line. For those who don't know, standard-guage is trainglish for your typical railway line. This would have been the main entrance.

The door to the tunnel is locked tight, but the local "artists" just see it as another canvas.

The second entrance was narrow-guage, which is a slimmer track commonly found in mines and quarrys. If you look at the ground, you can still see the indent from the old sleepers.

This tunnel just curves around before it's eventually blocked off.

Check out the ceiling though. These white things are minature stalactites. Water droplets have seeped through and the minerals contained in them have dried into these little bumps. That's quite cool.

Back in the early days of the war, trains would have come through these entrances and unloaded here. Now you can barely tell it was ever indoors. But don't worry, a huge proportion of the facility awaits us underground. 

 

Stopping to admire the graffiti first...

Some guy called Tom has tried to sign every rock for some reason.

From what I understand, after the ceiling collapsed on this now outdoor area, the remaining underground portion was bricked off. But that's not to say there isn't a way in.

There are still two entrances, although these yellow doors were added in 2003 to stop pesky kids from wandering in. It hasn't worked. From what I hear, the local kids and the powers that be are in a perpetual struggle. Someone blocks it off, someone breaks the blockade down, until someone blocks it off again. It's possible that whoever puts in the effort to secure the facility has now given up entirely. One final warning from "Jack B" says "Don't enter."

Sorry Jack B, you're not my dad.

The second door was wide open, and anyone could just stroll on in. As you can see, there are some old train buffers here to stop trains from proceeding any further. Prior to the collapse in 1942, the yellow wall wasn't there, nor were the buffers, and the trains would just roll right on in. Following the collapse, and the subsequent clear out of all the debris, the  buffers were installed so that trains stopped here, using the now-outdoor area for open storage.

Let's slip inside!

In the early 1940s, the trains would have stopped here and folks would be hard at work unloading bombs and carting them off to whatever storage bay they needed to go into. This place is huge, too. Much, much bigger than I was expecting.

The little area where the train pulled in is now flooded, but there's steps down to it if anyone fancies a paddle. I don't particularly fancy that. It's pretty stagnant. I could still hear running water somewhere in here though, and the echo made it thunder around magnificently.

Originally the whole area was once a quarry consisting of numerous pits connected by underground narrow-guage railway tunnels. It opened up in the 1870s and was at the time the largest quarry in the area. In 1883 it had a workforce of 70 men, but by 1898, the workforce had exploded to 273.

It's historic significance to the mining industry came in 1869, when two carts of nitroglycerine exploded on route to the quarry, only a few miles away. It was said at the time to be the largest man-made explosion in history, with the media reporting that it could be felt 38km away. I'm not sure what the media was like in 1869, but it was probably better than the mainstream media of today. But then, so is syphilis. 

Interestingly I've seen the term "Largest man-made explosion in history" used quite a few times to describe historic explosive disasters. It seems that once long ago people were quite hyperbolic with that phrase. It's like the "I love you" of the 1800s. I suppose it was made redundant after two world wars and a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

Following the 1869 explosion, two craters each ten feet deep were found where the horses and carriages had been, one wheel was found over 800 meters away, and debris was found in multiple nearby villages, including human and animal remains. Only one of the deceased could actually be identified, but it was later ascertained that six people were dead, including three adolescents, one of which was an eleven year old boy who had been helping his blind father purchase a sheep at the time. It must have been pretty hard on his father, to have a sensory impairment and suddenly losing his son and guide, and not having a clue what was going on. It sounds pretty tragic. Numerous other people were injured, and one man had to have his arm amputated.

The historic ramification of this incident was an act of parliament prohibiting the import of nitroglycerine, which ultimately led to quarrys using dyamite instead. Dynamite was actually a fairly recent invention, being invented in 1866 by Alfred Nobel, who the Nobel Prizes are named after.

It's an interesting story. People focus on the war time history of these places, but the Victorian quarry industry was deadly too.

 

This is just standard wall scrawling. I've seen "Look behind you" so many times, along with weird obsessions with misfortunes falling on ones grandmother. It'a not original. But we're still by the entrance. People with unoriginal thoughts won't be the ones venturing in deep.

Here's some art, next to your standard pentagram, and a not-so-standard swastika. Someone fucked that up, didn't they? Amateur fascists. Hitler was a twat but at least he got his twattery right.

The workforce of the quarry dwindled in the new century and by the time it closed in 1930, only two men were on the payroll. The glory days were over. 

And then in came the air ministry, who decided that this would be suitable for the storage of 18,000 tons of bombs.

 

So the facility opened in 1939, and bombs were transported here via train directly from the factories where they were manufactured. Around the underground portions were a few outbuildings, all built with slate, where a female workforce sorted out bullets, their employment being a result of most of the men being off fighting in the war. Nowadays this doesn't sound too controversial but this was a completely different era for equal opportunities. It only took a world war to break some barriers down.

I'm not so sure about the workforce down here though, although I have seen speculation that it was mostly civilian volunteers. I'm guessing from the fact that it was specified that females sorted out the bullets, that they didn't get to sort out the bombs, but I can't be 100% sure.

 

So the bombs came in and they were stored in their respective bays. You'll notice throughout the facility the individual bay letters and numbers written high up on the walls. Whenever the RAF needed bombs, they'd put the order in, and they were sorted, loaded back on a train, and sent to their respective destination.

Here, scrawled on the support pillar, is a little pencil doodle of a woman spreading her legs. This was probably done by one of the folks who worked here in the 1940s. I don't know for sure, but some other pencil doodles around here did have a date on it, and I've seen this sort of thing in underground military facilities before. It's human nature to express oneself.

Paranormal enthusiasts will be disappointed to know that any fog in these pictures is actually my breathe. It was pretty chilly down here, and I found myself having to take multiple shots just to get one where my own exhalations weren't visible.

While the pillars are original, it's thought that the brickwork was added after the collapse of 1942 to prevent any further collapses. This is why the brickwork obscures a view of the bay number on the wall there. The bay number simply wasn't important anymore. The brickwork doesn't quite reach the ceiling, which is interesting. It's probably reinforcing the wall.

The local kids have used the opportunity to scrawl on the ceiling.

The 1942 collapsed was pretty catastrophic. It was eventually attributed to  pressure from the government to accelerate and cheapen the cost of construction. As always, cutting corners for short term profit, but with long term disastrous ramifications. People never learn.

Apparently cracks had been observed in the support beams and ceiling prior to the facility opening, but these were put down to minor defects instead of faulty design. Unfortunately they were actually in the middle of unloading a train when the ceiling came crashing down, and 27 carriages were crushed. Surprisingly, I can't find any mention of people dying in the collapse, but it seems difficult to believe that nobody did. However, the collapse cut off the rest of the facility from the main entrance. No trains could enter and therefore the RAF were cut off from what was estimated to be about 14% of their total stock. That's a little inconvenient during a world war. Luckily no bombs went off in the collapse. It was disastrous, but not nearly as bad as it could have been.

Over the next nine months, most of the bombs were safely recovered and the debris cleared out, but the part of the facility that was still underground, that we're currently scurrying around, was considered unsafe and never used for bomb storage again. They bricked it up and abandoned it.

As you can see, the majority of the graffiti is still more "I just got back from the Jeremy Kyle show" than actual art. It's a shame. This place would look spectacular if the walls were covered by real artwork.

The acoustics in here are pretty amazing. Every minor sound has a powerful echo. One thing I noticed for the first time, but have noticed ever since, is that Jess sings to herself really quietly while she explores. In regular locations, it's barely audible unless one stands right next to her and listens carefully, but here I was underground, and I was hearing singing coming from every direction. I said to Jess numerous times "Someones in here singing." She just thought I was bonkers. With her, it's subconscious and habitual, so even she didn't realise that she was the culprit. It made for some comical confusion.

Thankfully it wasn't all just spacious abandoned storage down here, but there were also two awesome 1940s elevators. I wasn't aware prior to the adventure, but the facility was spread over two floors.

The lifts are upstairs. I don't know if there's any particular reason why the military moved the elevators upstairs before they abandoned the facility, but it's quite cool that they haven't come crashing down after decades of decay. 

There are two lifts in total, although apparently there was a third in the area that collapsed, cleared out with the rest of the debris.

After so many decades, I doubt that these elevators could be restored to working order, but they're still examples of vintage technology, and I'm quite surprised the metal hasn't been stolen.

Luckily the elevators being permanently upstairs didn't halt our ascent, as we noticed a stairway at the back. But prior to deciding to go up, there was a rather entertaining incident with a random man who decided to stand in the entrance and bellow someones name. Clearly he was looking for somebody and had concluded that they might be here, but what was weird was that after a while he stopped calling someones name and just decided to start screaming mindlessly into the abyss. At one point Jess and I actually went to the entry bay to watch him do so, although he didn't spot us. He didn't venture in, which is great. One less weirdo in my life. 

After a while, the sight of a grown man screaming randomly got a little boring, so we decided to leave him to it, and slip upstairs.

Upstairs things were prettier. I like the arched ceiling. I also like the thought of entering an underground facility, going upstairs and still being underground.

There are still light fixtures on the ceilings here.

And the graffiti is starting to improve too.

This is by far one of the best examples in the entire place. I love it. Keep in mind that this place is pitch black, so this is actually pretty sinister. That's how you make a place scary, not by scribbling "behind you" or drawing bad swastikas, but by making sure that when people turn their heads in the dark, there's a creepy face smiling at them.

This place would actually make a fantastic scare attraction... if it was cleaned a bit.

I did actually step into one of the lifts, which was probably a silly idea. It held my weight though. It actually felt quite sturdy for something that's not been used since the 1940s.

"The 21st Century is the place to be." 

Written before 2020, I assume.

Some of the graffiti up here is actually quite creative.

Despite bricking off a massive underground facility, the 1942 collapse didn't mark the end for this place. The RAF School of Explosives moved to the site in 1943, and used the exterior collapsed area for dismantling and demolishing explosives and incendiary items. I guess the wide open courtyard tucked away from everyone made an ideal location for any potential explosions. Over the next few years they destroyed pretty much every type of explosive that the RAF had. However, they were sloppy with how they disposed of it all. Often they'd just dump bomb debris into the old quarry pits, leaving bits of old explosives casually strewn across random ledges. 

Quite intriguingly, after the war the site was also used to store roughly 70,000 nerve gas bombs confiscated from German military bases, but the MOD wouldn't comment on this. Some even say that they outright denied it. But it would come out eventually.

This face is identical in style to one that I saw in that abandoned student accomodation block. It's probably done by the same artist.

I had to look up what Wiwar means. It's some Warcraft character. But nevermind that! I like these plants.

This entire wall is dedicated to Alice in Wonderland. 

This graffiti amused me far more than it should have. Pyro Rob. What a legend. The pure bliss on his face while epically failing a high jump due to his elephantitis leg is what really brings me joy about Pyro Rob. Bless his little (and large) cotton socks.

This graffiti says "I'm from the year 4716. It's shit."

Can they at least travel in 4716? I had to cancel my urbex trips abroad because of this damn virus. Fingers crossed for next year though.

The RAF School of Explosives moved out in 1955, and any remaining goods went with them. The facility officially closed a year later. It just sat here, empty in the countryside, totally abandoned.

But in 1969, the sloppy disposal of explosives was taken into consideration, and someone decided that maybe it wasn't the most brilliant idea to leave a load of bomb debris scattered around the landscape. Especially given that some of the dumped bombs were potentially still functional. An RAF disposal unit came in to clean up the mess. This was perhaps one of the few bomb disposal operations that was instructed by mountain rescue. The team had to be trained in rock climbing and tunneling. It must have been quite fun, although some of the explosive detonators and fuses were deteriorated so badly that they had to be handled very carefully. There was also an incident where a guy was injured by some spilled mustard gas. The kind that the MOD said wasn't being stored here. 

But by 1973, it seemed the clean up was finally over. That was, until some Royal Navy divers were called in to check the bottom of some of the pits that had filled with water, just in case some of the bombs had been dumped in there.

The divers confirmed that the entire lake bed was littered with bombs, and over 20,000,000 gallons of water was pumped out in order to retrieve them. It took a further two years to get them all out, with the entire operation concluding in 1975. It's estimated that they'd disposed of around 352 tons of explosive items and 1,420 tons of non-explosive ordnance debris. 

That's certainly an unideal amount of explosives to casually leave behind. But with the job done, they turned their back on the facility forever. 

Now it's all just a trashy canvas.

I guess the adventure wouldn't be complete if someone hadn't drawn a penis somewhere.

Moving back downstairs, there was one final bay that I need to show...

Here's some more vintage graffiti, scribbled on to the support pillar in pencil by whoever worked here. This couple have an eerie resemblance to old alien encounters, when people reported more human-like Greys, rather than the classic midget with big eyes that we know as Greys today.

The source of the ever-present water echoing around the place was this open drain. If anyone does go here, watch out for it. It's a bit of a trip hazard.

Here's some graffiti dated 1942. This was in April, so a few months after the collapse that happened in January of that year. This raises some idea of how tedious the effort was to recover bombs from the facility and clear the debris. It took nine months in total, and this person was quite literallty counting the days.

At the back of this bay, I found something awesome...

It's a door! It's yellow like the exterior ones, which means it was only fitted in 2003 to keep people out. But someone has cut a hole in it. It's impossibly tiny but I figured I could just about squeeze through. The problem was, its height is rather awkward and its size meant I couldn't just step through one foot at a time. Of course the sensible option would be to not go through at all, but if I was the sort of person to go with sensible options, I'd just spend my free time sitting at home watching TV rather than having epic adventures. Life is for living!

...Sure is a tiny hole though.

I could either superman it and faceplant the floor while cutting my belly on the metal door, or pull myself up on the doorframe and lower myself through feet first. I decided on the latter method.

But you see, the door didn't have anything to pull myself up with on the other side. Unless I wanted to do the awkward faceplant method on the way back out, I was kinda stuck here. Jess decided to wait outside... fair enough. She'll almost definitely outlive me. 

Somewhere at the back of my head, my survival instinct was starting to dust itself off and give my brain a good bollocking. But really, I figured the best thing I could do was see where the tunnel led, and hope that the external exit wasn't blocked.

Back in the day, this was the rear exit of the facility. When the train yard collapsed, all those bombs were slowly excavated and removed from the facility via this tunnel. It's an awfully narrow tunnel for the number of bombs that had been delivered via train, but at the time this was the only way to access them. It's no wonder it took nine months.

Before that, it was one of the old quarry tunnels. I was finally exploring a mine for the first time! About time, really. 

On the ground it's still possible to see where the old narrow-guage rails were.

Most intriguingly was this brickwork. It's clearly blocking off another tunnel, and someone has also broken it down to get in. I went in, but behind the brickwork the tunnel is filled with rubble. I thought maybe I could squeeze through a gap anyway, but then something less than ideal happened. My torch ran out of battery.

Well, shit.

I gotta be honest, being stuck in an old mine with no source of light was perhaps not the best scenario. Luckily, I still had my camera flash to give me some idea of what I was walking on. I just had to be very careful.

Up ahead, I finally caught a glimpse of sunlight.

I emerged from this little hole, finally thinking I was out. But alas, the sunlight was coming down this vertical shaft.

GODDAMMIT! 

I think back in the 1940s all the cables came down here to power the electricity in the facility but I might be wrong. Whatever the purpose, it was useless to me now. 

However there was a way out nearby...

It's just a bit flooded. I would have to take my shoes and socks off and paddle. And I was cool with that. There's nobody around to see my hideous feet. Back when I was little, I was always swimming in rivers and at the bottom of waterfalls and such. This was just like my childhood, but without the molestation.

So the mine brought me out into this pit. There was a bit of a scramble ahead of me to get back out, and then I'd have to get my sense of direction back and figure out where Jess was. But given that I'd just been stuck in an old mine tunnel with no light, I was happy to just be alive. It was only when I was putting my camera back in my bag that I made a startling discovery. I had a spare torch on me this whole time! Goddammit!

And just like me, the story of this facility doesn't end here either. The area is currently fenced off and the media occasionally warn people not to enter. One article even specifically says word for word "The council is issuing its annual warning for people to stay away."

So trespass here has always been an issue, and has been for generations. The only reason I found out about it was because somone told me that she came here for illegal raves.

But it seems that there could be a bright future for this place. In 2014 a hydroelectric pumping station was proposed for the facility, and as of 2019 it was at the "detailed engineering design" stage, whatever that means. Some members of the public reacted negatively, with concerns being raised about chemical weapons being stored here, and toxic residue being in the water. Water samples from 2012 and 2015 debunked the toxic residue theory, but the MOD keeping tight lipped on the chemical weapons thing really didn't help matters when the document about the chap being injured by mustard gas surfaced, forcing them to admit that yes, chemical weapons had been stored here. They haven't really done themselves any favours there. Some have gone on to say that german nerve gas bombs can even be seen in some recent photos of this place, calling for another clean up. The powers that be are insisting that they have already cleaned it up. The struggle continues.

But I fucking love this place! How cool was that?

Next blog, I'm dragging Jess to another death trap in the form of a giant mill, and then we're checking out an unusual car graveyard. In the meantime, follow my Instagram, follow my Twitter, follow my Reddit, and like my Facebook.

Thanks for reading!