Pyestock Diaries

Had my bad luck associated with the Magpies started to dissipate? The sky was getting lighter and the forecast rain was yet to appear. But we weren’t going to count our chickens yet.

We were extremely cautious and decided against trying to find a way through the piping ducts under the secondary security fence towards Battle. Instead, after getting several exterior shots of Admiralty, we retraced our steps back to the security fence at the south tip of the site, followed it north-east, and moved north towards the pipe array at the back of the Air House. After navigating the pipes, we quickly crept back along Monks Passage, returned the video to the Computer Building, crept back along our underground rat-run and emerged in the basement of Cell 4.

We failed to get into the newly discovered Cell 4 control room again (although I subsequently found out how it was done and very elegant it was too.) But it allowed a thorough exploration of the various offices to the south of Cell 4; some rooms looked like laboratories which had only just shut whilst others had stalagmites dripping through the concrete ceilings, their mineral deposits forming peaked crusts on spilled filing cabinet contents. It felt like Cell 4 had been abandoned for a long time.

We found other interesting rooms: such as the passageway linking Cell 4 to another building (the simply named Brian’s Bridge) and a concrete cage on the top of the Cell itself which contained various pieces of small plant and piping. But the light had started to fail again, the rain was threatening and we’d finally run out of time.

The pipe array as seen from the western side of the Air House. 23|05|07 © Simon Cornwell 2007