I’m talking with my mate and work colleague who’s a local about something we could go and explore that’s not too far and Llanberis bomb store comes into the conversation. So we meet in Llanberis and head towards Glyn Rhonwy. This massive quarry often see’s wild swimmers and adventurous climbers access it, despite the possibility of what may exist in the water. Unfortunately a number of people have died in this area also.
The first part we go and explore is a water filled quarry pit which still see’s lot’s of people swimming in it regardless of the warnings. Though there could be something sinister deep under the water here…heading down a steep slope through thick vegetation we pass through an ominous looking archway through tonnes of slate rock and arrive at the bottom of the pit where deep blue green water shines, and a rock platform sticks out into the water. My mate tells me about how lots of people he knows played here as kids and I can see why it looks like somewhere that would be a proper adventure to kids, despite being probably even more dangerous back then.
Next we end up in the munitions store, purely by accident. Glyn Rhonwy is property of the RAF and legally speaking you shouldn’t access it however I accidentally lost my way near one of the many holes in the fencing we happened to be walking along trying to find my contact lens. Contact lens found we see the very obvious collapsed area, a vast concrete floor in the quarry below us, surrounded by vegetation looking like one of the map locations from Fallout 4 The area of collapse is massive and just gives you an idea about how bad it actually was when the roof here caved in.
I’ve not done a lot of what they call urban exploring but this is a hell of a place to start for a first outing, and that because this bomb store was created during the second world war utilizing the huge quarry pits around Llanberis as storage for over 14,000 tons of bombs, in fact It wasn’t until the 1970’s that the site was entirely cleared of munitions. To get munitions into the site they were moved using railway lines located at the bottom of the building, and there are large lifts inside the store also. As mentioned previously however the site suffered a massive ceiling collapse which was brought on by use of 40ft of slate waste being placed over it to camouflage it from German aircraft flying overhead. This slate would have weighed an extraordinary amount and all it took to overload the roof was weather that is not unusual weather for the North Welsh Mountains, which fell on the 25th of January 1942. The result was that two thirds of the roof of the building collapsed, also burying a train carrying 27 wagons of ammunition , and also around 14% of the RAF’s combined ammunition stock. The store had only been open for 6 months before this disaster which was likely caused by trying to reduce costs and speed up the building of the facility. A operation was undertaken to recover the munitions that were trapped in the rubble and then to move them to another site, though it appears it was also still being use for storage up into it’s final closure.
I Know A Song That’ll Get On Your Nerves….
While we are on the subject of storing weapons, the site also has a worrying history beyond just storing a few normal munitions anyway here’s the story. Following the end of WW2 confiscated German Tabun nerve gas shells were stored here later being moved to another holding facility. Officially these shells were removed from the site though it’s easy to read between the lines when you read that during a board of enquiry that a statement was made to say “all German chemical weapons appeared to have been successfully removed from RAF Llanberis”. You may be thinking as I am that ‘appear to have been removed’ isn’t closure and it’s that detail that will have been picked up on, especially as reportedly there were 14,000 tons of nerve agent filled shells being stored here. Tabun nerve gas is interesting stuff, originally developed as pesticide in Germany in 1936 apparently has a faint fruity smell (not the sort of thing that would ring alarm bells) it causes loss of consciousness, convulsions, paralysis and potentially fatal respiratory failure. It is heavier than air so it would be a greater hazard as a gas in somewhere low down and sheltered like say…a quarry. The most disturbing thing about Tabun potentially being here, maybe in the water filled pits is that it easily mixes with water. In recent times as there is a plan to turn the site into a pumped hydro power station https://www.snowdoniapumpedhydro.com/about and this drew the concern of an environmental group who made a freedom of information request to the RAF which they rejected with a statement that by a concerned group who later made a freedom of information request to the RAF which was rejected with the statement that “release of the information would enable ill-disposed persons or organisations to act against the national interest, and that therefore on balance the information should be withheld”.
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/questions-over-nerve-gas-gwynedd-11177880
Which seems to indicate one of two things: they still aren’t sure if all the nerve gas shells are gone or, the nerve gas is known to be there. Probably worth bearing in mind if you have any intention of urban exploring here, that and the possible presence of notorious WW1 trench gas phosgene. Needless to say I’m probably never going to risk a swim here, just in case.
In We Go
Climbing down a proper hazard of a slope into the facility you get a proper sense of the scale and the possible danger of this being hit with an arial bomb, filled with explosives that would be utterly devastating. You can see the size of the roof collapse also, it’s huge and before long we we are large open area in the centre of the facility would have all collapsed. And that’s where we are standing now, a stood in the vast area where the roof fell in. A sizeable chunk of the facility does still exist at either end however, so we head first to what’s left of the storage area, through a graffitied yellow painted metal door.
Initially you notice the platforms where the cargo trains would have stopped, now flooded and filled with junk, something you don’t want to fall into. That and the silence that’s only broken by the echo of your own footsteps. It may be super creepy in here but despite this the site has been the location of various illegal raves, much to the annoyance of local police, and you can see why as the parts of the building that are still intact are vast. You have to make sure you don’t slip in the laughing gas cartridges lying around everywhere. from past parties.
Having a background in music technology myself I can’t actually imagine how bad it would sound in here with a massive rig because as each step we take into the building the reverb means the sound of our steps are initially doubled and because of the delay of the reflection multiplied, almost like more people are following us across the other side of the building which is pretty unnerving. Any music in here must have been utterly head twisting because you can clap your hands here and it’ll come back to to delayed and multiplied by about six times. Most of the graffiti is pretty amusing as a lot of it has clearly been created with the kind of creativity only a boat load of drugs or a mental problem give you. All the weird acoustics in here considered and with me having watched way to many horror and murder movies the vast echoey chambers of this facility make me wonder if a masked killer is going to appear from behind one of the many archways and start hacking away at us. Well…it would still be better than a day at work anyway. I guess that says a lot really preferring having someone trying to murder us than engaging in customer service, I’d surely find it more fun in some respects. Deep into the ammo store clearly drug fuelled graffiti announces that apparently everyone has forgotten how to be naked and how to spell. You can forget about getting naked in a place like this unless you want to be picking glass out of yourself though. Unless that’s your thing, maybe it was.
The vast chambers of what is left of the storage areas no longer hold anything but the original lifts and quite a lot of detritus from what’s probably been a number of illegal events and camp outs. The lifts are huge things, though they would have had to move the extreme weight of shells and other ordnance. You wouldn’t want the lift to fail and drop that even a short distance ‘kaboom!’
Having explored the storage areas, we of course cant resist climbing through the narrow window in the metal door that seals off the rail tracks in. This is pretty difficult, someone has left the frame of a chair as something to put a foot down on here, which just about gives you the stability to do a kind of yoga move to squeeze yourself through the gap and into the darkness beyond. I try not to imagine the pain if this goes wrong and my full weight comes down on the thin metal door edge, and just focus on squeezing through. I manage to get through still with my private parts attached to the lower half of my body somehow.
On the other side of the magic yellow door of castration there’s a rail track through the rock that looks like what I’d imagine to be the tunnel to hell in a Clive Barker novel. All It’s missing is some deformed cenobites attached to the metal things pegged into the wall bleeding all over the shop. This is one of the rail tracks that would have brought the ammunition into the facility.
We reach the end of this tunnel and can’t continue much further here as there’s some water about wellington boot height but I expect this leads into a further part of the quarry.
We explore a little further but this area doesn’t offer much more than one tunnel out and one that’s been sealed, who knows what is back there. I’m not about to start moving rocks to find out though especially if the special prize is a face full of Phosgene. The tunnels do have quite a lot of character though, I could almost imagine Keith Flint from the Prodigy when he was still alive bouncing off the walls here to firestarter.
There’s probably more to explore I’m sure but without wellies it’s time to head back into the daylight and relative safety of the North Welsh countryside.
Requiem For The Extreme 