Just for info, the "room" at 15 minutes is where there was located a "pig" receiver. The pig is an inflatable hard rubber sphere put into the pipe at an upstream pump station to clean any deposits from the pipe wall, or push thru any water which may have collected in low sections of the pipe, or to separate different grades of fuel in the pipeline. The T piece of pipe i.e. the redish bit with the data plate on showed a pig detector, (the sticky up bit), but the associated valves, bypass piping and openable pig receiver pipe sections have all been removed.
There called bore holes for checking water table levels. You only find them when underground buildings are present. It's to indicate if the underground buildings are likely to be flooded so you create bore holes to the same depth or deeper to check how high it is and take fort night measurements to check for levels drops or highs.
Still in use till the cold war ended, I was always told the fuel dump was used as part of the underground fuel supply, RAF west raynam is near by, though this was a bloodhound missile site, but if you take a ride towards Fakenham the old RAF sculthorpe site is visible with a lot of large pipe work just inside the fence line, presumably to receive fuel pumped from the near by storage site. Sculthorpe was mothballed but was opened up for two weeks every year, The Usaf deployed from Mildenhall, moved in and ran exercises and flew the U2 spy plane. I use to supply hire vehicles to them and deliver on site.
I have the control box an wet ni cad batteries which was from falmouth Cornwall. They were used as a back up system in case of a power cut to turn on the fuel pumps to pump fuel to raf st mawgan in Newquay
Nice video. Tip for cleaning wet lenses. Take a chamois cloth and cut it into 1 inch strips. Place the stips in a zip lock bag & use when necessary. Guaranteed smear free
There used to be two of these sites in preston approx 50 years ago, both were 10 times bigger than these sites, one was situated just of the docks on wall end road, inside there were massive valves, some of which read pumps to scotland, the other was at the rear of Thurnham road on the larches estate, this was demolished to make way for a housing estate, there were areas allover both sites that were fenced off with barbed wire, and had signs with skull and crossbones, with the words ethyl sludge buried here, as kids we thought ther was a witch buried in these, but in reality it was the sludge that they cleaned off the tank walls, both sites were run and maintained by esso fuels.
I've been wondering for ages what those blue "pipe" things are- there are a bunch of them dotted around my town, both across the road from me on a small patch of disused land and down by the river on a similar area of waste land. It was great to look through the comments and finally get some proper answers!
Hi Gang, what a shame they were all blocked, maybe they sealed them so the sheep wouldn't get hurt, more than likely though it was to stop explorers. Still a very cool place to see and also to document. Another awesome explore, thanks for sharing. xx
I think that's a great idea to have a GoPro on your chest for security reasons why I've just bought myself a GoPro hero5 mate for the same thing from your Cornish fan
Hell Ian, nice work again. Which was the video you made where you went down that old Naval fuel storage facility? The one you ended up running out of thinking there were other people there. I want to watch it with my son tonight. Cheers.
Hi guys amazing place and it’s a pity everything was bricked up but it’s still brilliant footage of what was still and it was amazing to see a few golden gems 👍🏻😊
fairly close to me that one .. shame its all bricked up but with the possibility of asbestos and left over fuel oil you can understand it....the one thing I regret is not being able to have a look into the underground 'ammo' store at hadleigh before they de-commissioned it and built houses on top of the site.
At 12:33 you mention about grazing cattle in the field, the yellow plants growing all over the Field are Common Ragwort Senecio vulgaris, people who graze cattle know this plant very well, if cattle graze on this plant it makes them really sick and can kill them, and the cattle themselves avoid this plant at all costs....Just another bit of useless information.....Mike
