The haunted folly tower

Today I'm looking at this folly tower. It was an unplanned visit. My friend and I just happened to be in the area and fancied checking it out. Wikipedia said that it was locked to the general public, but photos on the internet suggested otherwise. I have a soft spot for follys, as any long time reader will know from previous blogs. This one surprised me in that it turned out to contain a real rabbit hole of spooky stories and local legends. In fact some have described it as one of the most haunted places in the UK.

To clarify, I do have some interest in the paranormal, and I have experienced things that I would describe as such, but at the same time I approach it with a level head, ready to find a rational explanation. It's only unexplainable when every rational explanation has been ruled out. I don't point out dust in my pictures and call them orbs. I'm not one of these mediums who claim that the shadow over there is telling me that it's name is Mary and it's looking for its lost kids, in a voice that rather conveniently only I can hear. In fact I absolutely loathe it when people claim to be experts in the paranormal, because if it was a subject you could be an expert in, it wouldn't be paranormal, it would just be regular normal.
And also, while disembodied voices and apparition sightings happen to the best of us, I find that the sudden leap to the assumption that these are the souls of the dead to be a little bit of a premature conclusion. Hold on to it if you want, but where's the connection? If you see a shadowy figure move and suddenly vanish, it hasn't done anything to establish a backstory. It's just a shadowy figure.

See what I mean? My own experiences with the paranormal have given me only two pieces of information- something exists that I can't always see, and that they like to fuck with humans sometimes. Now I don't know what that is. Is it the spirit of a dead person? Am I perhaps just a little bit crazy? Did someone spike my drink? If you told me that it was sentient hive of micro-organisms that can group together in a figure resembling humans on occasion just to play with us, I'd find that equally as plausible as life after death because I have the same amount of supporting evidence. In fact I would argue that it's slightly more plausible because at least it's delving into the realms of pseudo-science, albeit ridiculously. Nobody actually knows for sure, and thats what makes it so intriguing.

But there's a lot to unpack here so lets start at the facts.

Originally a semaphore tower stood here. That is, a communications tower that could convey information over long distance via visual signals. But who needs a tower with an actual purpose when you can have a big decorative folly instead? In 1845, in the middle of an agricultural recession, a quarry owner decided to both advertise the stone from his quarry and provide employment by having the semaphore tower replaced with this thing, which was eventually nicknamed the Pepper Pot by locals.

It was later renovated in 1907 and turned into a hunting lodge, and it's just sort of dominated the scenery ever since, although there were talks about demolishing it in 1938. As you can see, that never happened. But for the locals this has often been a place for youngsters to come and fuck about in all their youngster glory. The folly and the caves in the woods surrounding it have hosted many a party, and at some point between the two world wars, some guys tried to launch their own home made plane from the hill. I'm not sure how well they did, but given that it's their descendants who passed the tale on, we can assume they survived.

As for the the towers accessibility, it was reported locked in 2008, but apparently it wasn't long after that the door was stolen by metal theives, and now we're left with this delightful health-and-safety nightmare.

The tower is actually covered in signatures dating back decades. This one is from 1938. At some point graffiti and vandalism does become history, and part of a buildings character.

The folly contains a single stairway leading upwards. I ran up the stairs with wild abandon, gleeful that I'd get a good view. However about half way up I suddenly realised that there was no handrail, and my survival instinct kicked in, urging me to take things a little slower. It's strange how much comfort a simple handrail can provide.

It was after we'd left that I looked up the history of the place, and found the legend attached to it scrawled on the wall of a toilet cubicle...

Actually I wish that was true, because toilet cubicle graffiti is definitely a better form of literature than the real place that I read about it, in the pages of The Sun. Of all the rags, The Sun has the most misleading title. It takes eight minutes for light to reach Earth from the sun, but you could read The Sun newspaper every day for your entire life and not come across anything bright.
Nevertheless, we have a ghost story and it goes like this-

Allegedly long ago a gypsy girl named Sally was locked in this tower, without food and water, and left to die. According to the legend, she now haunts the tower and the woods around it. Sometimes people see her, and sometimes people just hear her disembodied voice. Sometimes people hear her crying in the tower, and if people are really lucky they get to hear her scream like a banshee.

Supporting this legend is the fact that the road through the area is actually called "Sally in the woods," an alleged reminder that she's there, lurking around even today.
Sally allegedly likes to remind motorists of her presence. Sometimes she's seen at the side of the road, and sometimes she actually runs out into traffic with a look of terror on her face, like she's running from something. According to the stories, shes responsible for a total of eight fatal car accidents.
I've obviously not been content to let The Sun be my only source, so I've looked up the legend in multiple places and come across a few variations of the story. One version was that she was locked here by military folks. Another version is that it was her fiance who went missing around here, and she's spending eternity looking for him.
Some say that only motorists in the front seat will see her, so backseat passengers have nothing to worry about. Some say she only appears to male motorists.

That's a bit sexist, Sally. I get that you're centuries old but try to keep with the times at least. Women are allowed to see ghosts too.

But whether it's male, female, front seat or back seat, the articles claim that the locals will often refuse to drive up here at night.
As for the woods themselves, it's said that people report shadowy figures darting between trees, or standing and watching. Sometimes beastly noises are heard, such as howls or ferocious growls. Some say that an apparition of an old woman can be seen coming out of one of the caves before vanishing.

But I am aware that the media will take a story of a man stepping on lego and report that he's getting his entire leg amputated. That's just what the media does- it takes the mundane and finds a way to make it sell papers. So I'm going to find actual testimonies, dig a little deeper, regurgitate the facts as unbiased as possible, give my opinions, and let you draw your own conclusions.

There's a metal pole on the stairs. This is the remains of the handrail. It's likely that was also stolen by metal thieves.

So in regards to whether Sally haunts the road, I'm going to point out that we did see deer on our drive up here. It was dark and they just emerged from nowhere, ran across the road and vanished into the bushes. I'm fairly certain that they might be responsible for a few road accidents, and maybe even a few Sally sightings.

In regards to the roads name, there is an actual explanation for the road being called "Sally in the Woods," but it's quite a boring ordinary one. It turns out that Sally is archaic slang for a fight, and it refers to a historic battle that took place in the woods in 1643 during the civil war. It predates the tower that Sally was supposedly locked in by two hundred years, and seemingly removes a huge chunk of the myths supporting evidence.

Some graffiti says "Don't die going up," but someone has defaced the word "Die."
I guess it's a bit of a sore subject in this neighbourhood.

The earliest published record I can find of the ghost girl Sally was in a folklore book from the 1970s that tells of Sally haunting the woods after being struck down by an automobile. A later book published in 1998 claims that Sally was locked in the tower where she starved, although often the legends are combined, with some saying that she was held captive in the tower but somehow escaped and fled for help, before getting struck by a car. This certainly adds up with the stories that she has a look of terror when she runs into the road.

However the woods themselves were the stuff of legend even before the tower was built, and this is because of a local witch that many say is the woman people now known as Sally.

Her real name was Sarah Gibson, and she was born in 1724. Her family was huge. Her father came from a brood of eleven and her mother was from a brood of six. Sarah was the fourth daughter of the family, and quite nearly the last when her mother died during her infancy. But not to be put off spawning more humans her father remarried and managed to successfully shoot his DNA into his new wife a few more times, producing another four children.
Sarah married a gamekeeper called John in 1748. She moved in to his family home, which was owned by the estate that John worked for. He died in 1783 at the age of 58, and some of the sources that try to play up the witchcraft angle say that he died "suspiciously," and that it baffled medical science at the time. In all honesty it was probably pretty easy to baffle medical science in 1783, but nevertheless, it's well documented that he died of pneumonia. And in all honestly, believing that Sarah did use witchcraft to kill someone that she'd been married to for 35 years is a little silly, because she hasn't got a motive- Johns employers evicted her after he died. She was suddenly homeless, all because they wanted to free the house up for the new game keeper.

But the game keepers had numerous huts throughout the woods, and she was quite familiar with them, having often brought her husband food while he worked. So she gathered what few things she had and began squatting in one of these huts. Her husbands former work colleagues, feeling sorry for her, not only allowed her to stay there but actively worked to cover up her presence, and it seems that it was these attempts to hide her that started the rumours that there was something sinister lurking in the woods. People reported strange noises, dancing shadows, and over the next 41 years Sarah herself gained a reputation for being a witch and a celebrated "wise woman."

Now, being a witch likely just meant that she knew how to treat a few illnesses with various herbs, all of which baffled medical science at the time, because as we've established, this was easy to do in the 1700s. Nobody really has anything bad to say about Sarahs witchcraft, and many described her as a practitioner of white magic, although some sensationalist media retellings of her story do try to go for a more sinister angle, claiming that local children often went missing. But generally the worst she's ever been reported doing is asking people traveling through the woods to help her with her shopping, and then giving them bad luck if they said that they would but then didn't. Good for her.

Most astonishly, Sarahs date of death is recorded as August 12th 1824. She was only a few months off from a hundred years old.  No wonder she became a legend. She outlived everyone who originally knew her.

Sarah was mentioned in writings long after her death. According to some written documents in 1882, following her death the local carpenter and acting bailiff burned down her house, having been inside and seen a few witchcrafty things. He claimed that when the house went up in flames, her broomstick flew out through her chimney.
A later publication in 1899 tells of the ruins of "Old Sallys Cottage" and how she was a good witch but that she could fly using her broom and kept black cats. A later publication from 1929 tells of how Sarahs house was incredibly smoky and that she would hang her mugs on the ivy that encased her home, presumably so that they would fill with rain water and rinse out. Visitors and passers by would often leave coins in these mugs, and other tokens of gratitude for her so-called witchcraft.
Another publication, also from 1929, tells of how she earned a living offering refreshments to people who traveled through the area.

But you see, the legend of Sarah and all of the publications that mentioned her seem to predate the publications of Sally the girl who was locked in the tower. I guess it's pretty plausible that the story of a witch in the woods has been muddied over time, changed with each re-telling, given additional detail because of a big ominous tower, and undergoing a name change because of an oddly named road utilising archaic slang that just happens to be a womans name.
But again, so far this is just legend and myth. The best way to draw a line between media sensationalism and actual occurances is to ask the locals.

Here is the top floor of the tower, although there isn't much of it left. It sure has an ominous looking drop! Someone has drawn a clock here for some reason.

The upper windows are all smashed, but I did wonder what the locals thought of our lights up there. Perhaps we've unknowingly contributed to the local legends.

But on the subject of the locals, most opinions are pretty divided. It's not quite as bad as the media makes out, claiming that people are too afraid to come up here. On the contrary people come up here all the time. They either believe that the woods are haunted, or they think it's a load of shit. But it's rare that someone actually refuses to come here.

In regards to the tower, one man claimed that as a youngster in the 1950s he would often see lights on up in this tower, and that his father told him that there was some kind of bogey man up here that would come and get him if he didn't go to sleep. That's not really supernatural but certainly indicative of other retellings of the towers history.

In regards to the road, the car accidents are real, but what causes them remains up for debate. Some people do claim to have seen an old lady at the side of the road. One man swears that he thought he hit someone in his van, but when he got out to check, nobody was there. One man claims that an old woman appeared in the back of his car before vanishing. One woman says that while traveling through the area, she suddenly felt cold, and burst into tears for absolutely no reason, and then saw the old lady at the side of the road. Her husband didn't see anything and thought that she had lost her marbles.

Some other stories are a bit more personal and creepy. In  2007 a family were driving along the road when their four year old daughter kept repeating "I died over there," although in spite of being creeped out a little, they still drive up there and nothing has happened to them since.
Another woman says that while she has no memory of it, her father recalls that when she was four they drove down the road and she cried the entire time, claiming that she could hear people screaming.

So this seems to disprove the myth that the ghost only appears to men and front seat motorists. But you know what else it disproves? Sally the gypsy girl.

People aren't seeing a gypsy girl running into road in terror! People are seeing Sarah, the elderly woman who made a living offering refreshments to people traveling through the area! Sally who was locked in the tower, at this point, sounds like media hype. No actual testimonies claim to see a young gypsy girl, but plenty of people claim to see an elderly lady.

But while the gypsy girl may well be a media fabrication, there are apparently other ghosts. A paranormal group who investigated the area in 2008 reported picking up the presence of a man who had been struck down by a blow to the side of the head during the earlier skirmish in the 1600s, as well as the presence of a woman around this tower, but that she communicated to them that she didn't die here. Apparently one of the mediums picked up the presence of a 45-year-old woman who had an incredibly distorted face, asking if she could join their group. While they say she wasn't evil as such, her energy was unpleasant.

Here's a view looking directly down the tower from the top. It's pretty cool.

I'm a little curious about how the story of an elderly witch morphed in the space of a few decades into the tale of a gypsy girl, but perhaps this can be explained by looking at a few murders in the area that have actually been recorded. I got this idea when people I asked about Sally also started mentioning the murder of a girl called Tessa, which happened in 1978. It's a pretty brutal murder. She was nine. The killer was nineteen. He stripped her naked and cut her throat, and he eventually told the police that it was because she called him names. He sounds like a cunt.

The thing is, the murder of Tessa happened relatively near here, in the sense that an American might think Boris Johnson lives relatively close to Croydon. That is, geographically they're close, but to locals on a small scale, the tower and the location of Tessa's unfortunate murder are miles apart, so it seemed a little odd that people were getting the story of Tessa and the story of Sally confused. So I wondered if something similar had happened decades earlier that had maybe similarly led, through muddied re-telling after re-telling, to the Sally myth.

And this led me to the story of Elsie, a young woman who was murdered a few miles away, but in an area that has various caves and mines, just like the area around this folly tower. The similarity lends itself to the legend. A local girl is killed and found in one of the caves. There's a road going past a wooded area with caves with an odd name. Chinese whispers does the rest. It's probably not okay to call it Chinese Whispers anymore, but who cares?

Here's a view from the tower overlooking the woods. I guess it is pretty eerie.

So, Elsie's story is intriguing. She was a known liar and a bit of a scoundrel. While the media at the time said she was of German descent, because the murder of a foreign mystery woman sold more papers, she had in fact come from London. Her real name was Wilkie and her parents kept a coffee shop at Tidal Basin railway station. She was always a bit of a rebel, and was arrested for theft in 1880 when she was just fourteen. She ended up being carted off to a reformatory where she spent the next five years, with the sentence dragged out because she repeatedly clashed with the matron. Probably not helping the youngsters reformation, her family were quite relieved to see her go. She wrote to them in 1889 asking for forgiveness but they didn't want her, so she decided to change her name and reinvent herself.

Elsie got employment as a servant, in spite of her employers knowing about her past. According to them and to her peers, Elsie was surprisingly more educated and intellectual than her fellow domestics, which led to numerous rumours about where she had come from. However she was totally stealing from her employer and she was sneaking boys into her quarters, so she got a bit of a reputation as a scoundrel and a slut. In 1891 she was apparently on notice to terminate her employment, which had lasted only a few months, but then she went missing. Most people assumed she had run off with some guy and her parents were really not that bothered about finding her. It wasnt until 1893 that two schoolboys found a skeleton in a cave that was later identified as hers purely because it was wrapped in linen that she'd stolen from her employer. Above her eye was a penny-sized fracture indicative that she'd died from being whacked on the head.

The immediate suspect was a boy she was seeing, a coach building apprentice called Arthur who was actually eight years younger than her. Some of his friends claimed that he'd once bragged about murdering someone and getting away with it, but they assumed he was joking. He'd been seeing other girls on the side, including someone called Pollie. Witnesses in the past had heard both Arthur and Pollie make vague comments like "she ought to be dead," which exacerbated their suspect status, in addition to the fact that Elsie had caused quite a drama outside his house, claiming to be pregnant and making sure the entire neighbourhood knew that Arthur was responsible. Pollie had also had many a shout-off with Elsie and at least one physical fight but the most telling piece of evidence was that Arthur was treated for a wound on his hand, which doctors confirmed was a bite from a human being. He claimed he got it from some roudy liberals at a liberal fete but the police witnesses said that they'd all been on their best behaviour, and not at all bitey. To many this sounds like a self defence wound, inflicted by Elsie in her final moments.

But even so, there wasn't enough evidence that Arthur had murdered anyone, although he was certainly a man-whore. But the hiding place of the body shows some knowledge of the area and the fact that she was wrapped in linen from her stash of stolen things would imply that she was murdered in her lodging, and then removed. But he was known to be scrawny and few think he'd have the strength to do such a thing.

There are a few leads that the police probably could have chased a bit better but the police had spent more than they were willing to on an investigation on a mere servant girl, and so the matter was dropped. Pollie and Arthur got married and then in 1914 they fled to Canada, a move that many say was suspicious. Pollie died in 1946 and Arthur died six years later, so if they did have secrets then they've taken them to the grave.

So what's this got to do with Sally? Like Tessa, the murder of Elsie happened relatively close but not that close. However I totally think that the story of Sally in a woodland covered in caves is a chinese-whispered-to-death version of the story of Elsie, who was murdered and found in an area covererd in caves. At least thats my theory. How did the myth change locations from one cavey area to another? Because there's a fucking road called Sally in the Woods, and the cavey area where they found Elsie is now a golf course.
A conversation might go like this-
"I heard someone was found dead in one of the caves years ago."
"Ah, I only know one area where there are caves and its up by the tower. Is that why the road is called Sally in the Woods? Isn't that where people see that ghost?"

There you go. The story of Sally was born. But it's important to emphasis that this is just a theory of mine.

Paranormal investigators also seem to agree that Sarah and Sally are two separate entities, but also that there's a third demonic entity in these woods around a tower. And indeed, witness testimonies do go beyond seeing an old woman. Campers claim to have heard children laughing and crying, and also more eerily, seen hands pressing against their tent from the outside. One camper has told of how he went to get wood and came back to see two shadowy figures stood behind his friend. Another claims to have once seen a single file row of five children walking through the woods, all wearing tatty Victorian attire while chanting strange things before disappearing into the woods.

And even more bizarrely people claim to have seen large black cats, and also UFOs. The UFOs tend to be bright lights in the sky, often white or orange and sometimes red, zipping around soundlessly before vanishing, although one story does tell of a couple of campers noticing a giant black triangle hovering over them, which they barely noticed against the night sky because it was so black.

But by far the most common claim is that people have stumbled across the remnants of people practicing black magic, with circles laid out, pentagrams, animals skulls, old worn down candles, and whatnot. And if you believe in that sort of thing, such as summoning various things via ouija boards and whatnot, then you're probably coming to the conclusion that maybe some edgy kids or occult folks have let in some unknown entity, and now it haunts the woods and the folly tower.

The tower sure has a nice view though!

To conclude, if you believe in this sort of thing, then it's either an amazing place that you can't wait to check out, or you'll avoid it like the plague. I think the tower itself is nice enough to visit even without the ghost stories.

I have no doubt whatsoever that folks interested in magic and the occult do their dabbling up here due to its reputation. Kids fuck about. Some do satanic graffiti (the best examples are when they accidentally do the Jew star instead of the pentagram) The ramifications of that vary depending on what you believe. I've taken part in ouija boards before, and I'll almost definitely do them again just to see what happens, although I know for a fact that I have friends who think I'm poking a big spectral hornets nest and should stay the fuck away from that sort of thing.

I personally didn't experience anything at this tower, but it makes for a fun story either way. Personally I do think the story of Sally has got mixed in with some of the murders that have happened here, and the story has altered with every re-telling. And there certainly are enough murders to do that with. Just south of here there's another wood that's named "Dead Man Woods" on old Victorian maps, a name completely lacking in subtlety. They might as well name this area Murdersville.

But regardless, you have to admit that if all this is myth created because of a simple battle in 1643 then thats a hell of a domino affect. Imagine a simple skirmish causing a centuries-long ghost story.
 Fascinating really. The man who built the tower just wanted to provide work during a recession. The civil war soldiers just wanted to win, and Sarah just wanted to get on with life in solitude. They had no idea they were contributing to legend.

Thats all I've got. Next I'm looking at an abandoned pub, and then an abandoned garden centre! I've never done one of those before! Anyway, in the meantime, follow my Instagram, Like my Facebook and follow my Twitter! Thanks for reading!

Underground munitions tunnel

Hello everyone. I hope you're all coping well in these odd and strenuous times. The deaths from Covid-19 are sad and terrifying, and hitting a little close to home, but isn't lockdown itself a fucking doddle? Let me just hop into my time machine and ask people in the 1300s suffering from the Bubonic Plague how they'd feel about having to spend three weeks in a house with clean running water, electricity, clean food and sanitary products. We've got it good!

Although to be honest I'd probably be doing less well if I didn't have my hobbies to put my energy into. My hobbies came about as a way of coping with mental health anyway, and now that the world has slowed down, I'm finding the time to get on with all that mental self care that the daily grind of modern life doesn't allow time for. Everyone responds to a crisis differently. Who knew that my way would be with sunshine, smiles and angel queefs? A lot of people are stressing out over lockdown though, and this means that social media is a cesspit, more so than usual. Coronavirus? More like Groanervirus! My advice is to turn off the news and use this as an opportunity to embrace your passions. Maybe it's painting, maybe it's masturbating, or maybe it's both at the same time, in which case grow an afro and make a Youtube series called Bob Toss or something.

Speaking of videos, my old accomplice Jess has come out of hiding, and started editing videos about places we visited ages ago. Remember that nuclear monitoring bunker by the sea? Well you can watch it here. Remember that amazing Middle Earth looking hermitage? Watch that video here.

Want to read my latest blog? Keep reading. You're on it. 

Today I want to talk about this really amazing place that I visited with my friend and former work colleague Emma. We were in some far flung distant land for business reasons, and even though our company had booked us a hotel, we decided against the conventional options of getting drunk and watching TV. Fuck that. Great things are never achieved in comfort zones, and so we set off on an adventure. Emma didn't quite know what to expect- my world isn't hers. But the truth is this one even threw me.

On a quiet night this place looks like little more than a run-down shack rotting away in a field next to a railway line. However it houses a wonderful secret. Every now and again, trains would hurtle by, filled with passengers who had no idea that an important chunk of history was right here under their noses.

Granted, even we didn't know exactly what we were getting into.

What we've got here is the remains of a railway siding, with the remnants of  narrow-gauge tracks. Old photos do exist, showing that the railway siding did extent beyond this point, and in spite of its current condition was once full of activity.

(Photo from 1943, and not mine, obviously.)

And yes, those are military personnel, and yes they're in the middle of transfering munitions from a train to one of the platforms wagons. But where did the wagons go? Well once inside the shack, the siding then slopes downwards, deep underground.

At this point I wasn't expecting to find anything too spacious. I thought maybe it served some industrial purpose a long time ago, but there couldn't be a lot left to see. How wrong I was. This place is huge!

Once underground the rails turn left, through some big metal doors that would have once secured the facility. They've since been forced open, allegedly by a bunch of travelers who lived on the site a decade or so ago.

Basically, this facility was for the covert transference of munitions from the railway to a nearby depot back in the 1940s. 

In spite of the British military originally not taking the invention of the airplane particularly seriously, the first world war was brutal enough to give them pause for thought. I've actually covered the Germans aerial input in world war one when I explored the factory where the Fokker planes were built. The first world war was brutal. Some refer to it as less a war and more a massacre, and the British military were not taking any chances. It was decided that they should build underground bomb-proof storage areas, and then transport the bombs to it underground, invisible to aerial reconnaissance. 

There were plenty of abandoned mines and quarrys in the local area, and many of these existing tunnels were joined up, reinforced with concrete and laid with internal roads to make a massive subterranean bomb depot. It had six entrances connecting some five miles of tunnels, of which this is the only one still extant. This itself isn't a converted mine. It was purpose built to connect to what was there already. The railway itself didn't come close enough to the depot, and the road up to it was abysmal. but this underground rail yard allowed the munitions to be sorted and transfered underground, hidden from the attention of any potential enemies.

Construction of the tunnel actually started in 1937, but it wasn't operational until 1940. After the war, the facility was closed, but kept in operational condition until the 1950s. Some time after that it was abandoned and lost to nature, at least until the 1980s when it was opened up as a museum. At the time the facilities interior was still pristine and had all of the old munitions wagons silently waiting for the time they'd be useful again.

(Photo credit- Nick Catford, 1985)

The museum failed, and closed in 1990. The wagons were all sold, and the doors at the bottom of the access slope locked up. 

But maybe it was the exposure that the tunnel had in its museum days. Maybe it was the introduction of the internet. Either way, the tunnel wasn't a secret anymore, and thirty years later, it looks like this.

There's been fires down here, either arson or homeless folks trying to keep warm. We also found the remnants of fireworks, the smell of which still hung in the air, that were likely set off by teenagers mucking about. And as you can see, the local graffiti artists have been down here as well, to use its walls as a canvas. 

Alongside the rails are the remains of various offices. It was down here that the munitions would be sorted before moving on to the depot. In its glory days some 1000 tons of ammunition would come through each day, with the conveyance system speedily carrying it off to the depot. It was a very efficient system. 

Prior to the tunnels completion, an aerial ropeway was used, and even after the tunnel was completed this was retained as a backup, used if the conveyor system broke down for some reason. In 1944 it also came in useful in the build up to D-Day, the allied invasion of German-occupied France. During this time, both the underground tunnel and the aerial ropeway were active 24/7 for thirty days.

Here are the remnants of the urinals. I guess some people urinate lava.

These are still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.

A paranormal group in 2010 did report that the offices are haunted. Some claim to have seen a short chap with glasses, and some claim to have heard someone whistling. More morbidly someone suggested that something "unpleasant" had happened to a woman down here, and that her voice could be heard sometimes.

That all sounds very intriguing, but we saw, heard and sensed nothing. The only people down here were me and Emma. 

I actually have a fondness for this kind of graffiti. It's not art, but it's not simple tagging either. It's like shower thoughts, and there's often some kind of witty retort. Someone has said "Babies are the absence of condoms," and someone else has written "No shit."

I'm not sure what this contraption is, but it does resemble an electric transformer. I might be wrong. It's not my area of expertise. 

Now I know what this contraption is! But even so, its presence here is baffling because the nearest Morrisons is just over three miles away.

The sorting yard concludes at this tunnel. Once sorted, the munitions would be conveyed up this tunnel to the depot. We were quite eager to see where it led, enthusiastically taking the plunge into the darkness, not knowing at the time that it's 1.25 miles long.

It also has an uphill gradient of 1:8 which is a little steeper than a wheelchair ramp. Needless to say, we got a good workout.

Dotting the tunnel are the remants of the conveyance equipment, which is cool to see but odd in that its remains are so inconsistent throughout the length of the tunnel. It's like they started to remove it but then gave up. In likelihood it was removed by metal thieves. 

There's some interesting graffiti down here. Here's Master Splinter.

"I never had my way."

Why is this written in big letters in a tunnel? Sometimes, I can't help but wonder about the context.

Zombie Pluto, somewhat reminiscent of the Von Kiki and Honey zombie graffiti in the old Fokker factory, but not as good.

There's also footprints down here, indicative that this place still gets a lot of attention.

Of course, someone always draws a penis.

But here is next-level penis graffiti. Someone has scrawled a fifteen-foot penis across the ceiling of the tunnel.

I couldn't even fit it all in one shot. Fucking Hell.

Here's a farting fox, distressed by its flatulence.

Here's a monkey painting... something!

I guess it's open to interpretation.

Tom Davie loves girls under fourteen.

What, are we in Telford?

As we went deeper, so did the bizarre nature of the graffiti. I mean whats even going on here?

Lewis Cooper is a pussy, and so it Oscar Leaks.

This is pretty awesome. It looks like hundreds of water droplets preparing to plummet to the floor but they were actually solid to touch. What we have here are the early stages of stalactites. That is, the minerals from dripping water are forming icicle-like formations, commonly found in caves.

At this point the tunnel changes from rectangular to arched. The reason is that the tunnel ascends into a hill, in which the bomb depot resided. At first, where the tunnel was the most shallow and closest to the surface, it was built and covered in dirt, but as it goes deeper into the hillside it needed to be bored, and here is where the two different construction methods meet.

Someones drawn a door into the side of the tunnel. If only there really was more tunnels leading off...

Bloody Hell...

The deeper one goes into the tunnel, the less graffiti one finds. I guess not everyone wants to walk the entire length of the tunnel. However now that the modern graffiti isn't as common, one can see something pretty incredible...

This is all drawn here in pencil, some with remarkable cursive handwriting and little doodles, some of it dated to the 1940s. If this is genuine then its incredible that it's still down here. And there's actually a lot to support that it is genuine! When the place was active, it was vitally important that boxes and shells were correctly spaced apart, and so men were stationed at various points of the tunnel, given the simple but boring task of monitoring the munitions coming up the conveyor to make sure that nothing had slipped off or moved.

It sounds like a really easy job but as you can guess, standing in a gloomy tunnel to watch a conveyor belt for several hours is probably about as much fun as watching paint dry or going to a Kings of Leon concert. I mean, how often did something go wrong? Because that would be the only time the job got slightly less boring. These doodles could be the remnants of someone trying to keep themselves entertained.

If they did notice a problem, an emergency switch could shut off the conveyor, and once the problem was solved, the worker would signal it by turning the light off and on again. The conveyor would then be reactivated.

Incidentally its around the pencil doodles that the paranormal group from 2010 reported having objects thrown at them, but nothing like that occured on our visit. If there are ghosts here, we're in their good books.

The group also reported quite a feeling of hostility at the end if the tunnel, which we found ourselves now approaching.

Given the tiresome incline of the 1.25 mile walk, we definitely felt a sense of achievement once we got to the end. At least, I did. Emma was hungry, and we had a 1.25 mile walk back to fresh air. Luckily it was all downhill.

This would be where the tunnel joins the ammo depot, although it was blocked off when the main depot was purchased and started being actively used. To my knowledge there's no way in to it, and this is where the tunnel adventure ends. The following day we did take a look at the actual surface building of the depot and found it an active premises with real life humans scurrying around. Alas, its many, many vast subterranean secrets elude me for now. 

There is a hole in the wall though, although squeezing through it wasn't possible.

But while this is the end of the line as far as this tunnel goes, there are numerous mines in the area, one of which allegedly has a tedious 200ft belly crawl tunnel into the depot. That means of entry was blocked off in 1940 by the military, but reopened in 1989 when the depot was a museum. Presumably its once again blocked.

I've never explored a mine, and personally I'd like some experience before I go slithering down a crawl space. Emma certainly wasn't up for it. But I will return to check out the mines at some point, have no doubt.

Sadly I also wanted to check out some of the pillboxes that guarded the railway sidings, but Emma was quite insistent that we return to the hotel for food, having agreed to an adventure and not realising that she'd be walking for more than two miles. She was hungry and let's face it, we know what pillboxes look like. They show up in this blog all the time. My appetite for adventure had certainly been satisfied so I was okay with returning to the hotel for our company-paid meals.

That's all for today. Next time I'm checking out a big spooky building with a creepy legend, and then I'll be returning home to blog about something in Shropshire. In the meantime, follow my Instagram, like my Facebook and follow my Twitter.
Thanks for reading!