Pyestock Diaries

I was already planning my next route. I'd seen a ladder disappearing into the heights to the south of the room, but couldn't work out how to reach it. It looked as if you could walk along a cable tray, twenty feet above the ground floor to get there. This seemed strange for Pyestock where normally access to everything was via a ladder of sorts, but it was worth a try. I swung over the rail of the walkway I was on and put my foot on the cable tray.

*Crunch*
Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle...

"What's happened?" asked Marlon, appearing from the gloom.

My foot had gone straight through the rusted cable tray, dispensing a shower of rusty fragments down onto the floor below, clattering and banging on the cables and pipework as it all scattered down.

"That's rusty. That's just completely gone." There was a perfect, cartoonish, foot-shaped hole in the tray. "Some of this place is rotten. It's been closed longer than we think."

It was a sobering thought but didn’t prevent us from clambering over the pipework for further pictures. Marlon was very taken by a huge void at the front of the testing machine, but the batteries in my torch were starting to give out again so it was impossible to light it. Plus the camera was also running out of juice. I'd taken hundreds of pictures again, but this time I was feeling much better about it all as it was all starting to make sense.

Standing on the midsection of Cell 4 looking west. 24|03|07 © Simon Cornwell 2007