Harpur Hill Tunnel, Buxton - Sept 2012

Nice shots as always dude!

Hell of a lot of debris in there where do you reckon its from?Brill photos & DVD.

flyboys90 said:

Hell of a lot of debris in there where do you reckon its from?Brill photos & DVD.

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Not got a clue to be honest, I'm not even sure what it was used for

lovely pics and great part of the world also,,,, nice

Went to a now closed boarding school in Buxton, and I remember that tunnel! Our hockey/cricket field was up at Harpur Hill. I love Buxton.

Small write up on wikipedia about the place.

Quote:-

Harpur Hill is a small village on the outskirts of Buxton, Derbyshire. It has a primary school, a park, a pub, a working men's club and a Methodist Church, and contains parts of the University of Derby. It also has 3 football pitches which are homes to Harpur Club & Harpur Hill FC, A person that lives in this area is known as a Harpur Hillian, or Harpur Hill Billy. Buxton Rugby Union Club also have their HQ at Harpur Hill. They can be found on Sunnyfields Road. The tops of Buxton Rugby Club's goal posts are the highest in the country.

In 1938 the RAF used Harpur Hill as an underground munitions store. Tunnels were dug out to house munitions and ordnance. When the RAF left the tunnels were used as a mushroom farm. When the tunnels closed they were sold to a group of local businessmen, trading as Stowtime, and used as a cold store for cheese; a warehouse was built for dry and bonded wines and spirits. A number of local hauliers provided the transport for these goods, the most notable being Lomas Distribution. The business was bought out by Christian Salvesen and was a major employer in the area. At one time, many people in Buxton were seen out and about in company-issued freezer coats! Christian Salvesen recently sold the site to French transport company Norbert Dentressangle. Many of the bunkers can still be seen in the surrounded hillside. A Health and Safety laboratory is also situated not far from Harpur Hill. A railway has been constructed with old Jubilee Line, London Underground trains that were used to reconstruct the 7/7 London Tube bombings. When the red flag is flying at the laboratory, an explosion is imminent.

great pics, good work!

This tunnel is the air intake for the Hoffman Kiln located nearby, (What 3 Words: unto.cooked.lake)which has been demolished.

The RAF bomb dump was not tunnels in the conventional sense, they built a huge concrete bunker with several tunnel like compartments in the bottom of the old lime quarry then to hide it from German aircraft they covered it over with quarry waste. The same construction was used at Llanberris (open for visits) but the weight of the slate debris was too much and it collapsed so they shut down the Harpur Hill bunker and built lots of small bankers arround the hillside linked by a narrow gauge railway. Near the end of the war they decided it was not going to collapse so they reopened the main site and for nearly 20 years the whole lot was filled with surplus Allied and Axis munitions including chemicals held in the railway tunnel at Buxton. Some was shipped to Cairnryan in Scotland to be taken out to a deep trench in the Atlantic and dumped but most was taken further up the Hill where the explosive was steamed out of the bombs and shells and then burned. Withouth the metal casing it does not explode just burn fiercely..

The tunnel visitted was as Benjy says linked to the Hoffman Kiln theough it looks to long for an air vent though the kiln was a huge oval over 100m long. It may therefore be for delivering the lime from the quarry I need to look into it as I live locally but more into military history than quarries.

Natters5 said:

Some was shipped to Cairnryan in Scotland to be taken out to a deep trench in the Atlantic and dumped

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Sadly no, it was taken to Beaufort's Dyke only a few miles offshore in the North Channel between Galloway and Ireland. By all accounts there's at least several hundred thousand tons of unstable high explosives including white phosphorus, phosgene and mustard gas shells too, plus tons of nuclear waste (bonus!) just waiting for a trawler's nets to snare them - or for Boris Johnson to propose building a bridge with its foundations driven bang in the middle of the explosive dump.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort's_Dyke