Acorn Patch

In my post Return to the Mineral Loop I mentioned my failed attempt to locate Acorn Patch.  I now know that this was entirely due to looking in the wrong place! Your silly bloggist has a large scale Ordinance Survey map on her smartphone, but preferred to let the Noom app track her progress and count calories.  And before you ask the obvious, sadly the phone doesn't have enough puff to run both apps at once.

Acorn Patch has an interesting history, which is all the excuse we needed for another walk in the forest.  So yesterday S-- and I parked Bluebell at New Fancy View - the site of yet another colliery - and plotted a meandering course northward, before returning along the Mineral Loop and via the off-visited Rising Sun Inn.

The excellent publication Rails through the Forest* says this about Acorn Patch:

The site, together with several square miles of surrounding woodland, was first managed by the RAOC in 1942, before being handed over to the US Army Ordinance Corps in September of that year.  Acorn Patch rapidly became the second largest US open-air munitions storage site in the UK and at its peak was estimated to have contained around 30 kilotons of explosives.

Most of the stockpiles of munitions were removed around the time of the Normandy invasion in 1944, but vast quantities of chemical weapons and drums of liquid gas remained in open storage, or at best beneath tarpaulins or open-ended Nissen huts, where they began to deteriorate. Post-war clearance proved to be a massive and protracted task, the last train not departing until 16th June 1953.

It seems that the only attack the US Army guys had to repel was from sheep, who liked to doze in the Nissen huts and also developed an appetite for the canvas tarpaulins! 

This old photo, copied from the book, dates from 1947 and has deliberately been inserted at very low resolution, as the original is © LE Copeland, WSP.  I hope he doesn't mind.  If you're interested, you could do a lot worse than buy the book and thus swell the funds of the Dean Forest Railway Museum Trust.

* Rails Through the Forest: Silver Link Publishing Ltd. 
   ISBN 978 1 85794 409 0