‘It has a really creepy feel to it’, she said. ‘You’d love it!’

Ever since the first lockdown, Mrs S has gone out on her bike at least once a week, exploring the local lanes, going a little further and getting a little fitter each time. In recent weeks she’s started taking a few empty tubs with her in her saddlebag, coming back with a glorious harvest of hedgerow blackberries. I’ve been able to convert these into delicious crumbles, tarts and jam and exchanged some with our neighbours for cooking apples from their tree. It’s been a good year for blackberries, people keep telling me.

While she was out blackberrying the other day, she told me when she got back, she came across what seemed like an abandoned village in the woods a few miles from here. In this woodland, away from the road, she found a host of derelict buildings, paved walk-ways and even a concrete square; all of them broken and half swallowed-up by vegetation and self-seeded trees. ‘It has a really creepy feel to it’, she said. ‘You’d love it!’

A lost village is definitely my kind of thing, so I immediately decided I had to get down there to explore.

At first the buildings were reluctant to reveal themselves from their clothing of leaves and branches. Then, in piecemeal fashion, we began to perceive their hidden shapes: a wall here, a doorway there, occasionally a chimney. What began to emerge, as we walked through this stretch of woodland just outside Marford in North Wales, was the bare bones of some kind of long-abandoned settlement. Judging by the red-brick building style and the extent to which nature had now taken over, I would date it at mid-twentieth century.

As we walked on, the track became a gravelled walkway, then a narrow tarmac road, before finally emerging into a clearing in the middle of the wood. Despite the proliferation of saplings now colonising it, it was clear that this was once a large tarmac-covered square. It seemed to me that this was once a car park or perhaps, now the idea began to strike me, a military parade ground.

As we explored further, the notion that this was once some kind of military installation seemed to be confirmed; we found several concrete bunkers and the entrance to what was clearly an air-raid shelter. The fact that this place was deep in the woods and far from any main road gave it a particularly sinister air.

We’d parked in a nearby lane and pushed our way through a hedge to get into the woodland. Mr S was right too, even in bright daylight the whole place had a decidedly eerie atmosphere. I returned on my own a few days later to take the pictures I intended to use in this report. Walking around the site, poking into corners and pushing my way through undergrowth, I constantly had the feeling that I was being watched, that my presence was being tolerated rather than welcomed.

What I discovered, from some research I did between my two visits to the site, was that Horsley Hall Wood was home to the No.12 Camp of the Royal Pioneer Corps between 1951 and 1958. The Royal Pioneers were a section of the British Army who specialised in light engineering tasks, such as mine clearance and constructing logistical infrastructure in combat zones.

No. 12 Camp housed between 400 and 600 troops and was an offshoot of a larger Pioneer Corps Depot at Hermitage Barracks in Wrexham. It was a training centre for new recruits and a military transport driving school, which explains the large tarmacked area in the middle of the woods.

The army finally left Horsley Hall Wood in July 1958. The square was used for remote control car racing in the 1980s, but since then the whole site has been left to be reclaimed by nature.

Just beyond the last building of No. 12 Camp, the woodland to the north is fenced off with barbed wire. In Part 2, to follow, we will look at what lies beyond that wire.

References

The Pioneer: Background History of the Training Centres 

Royal Pioneer Corps Major Units