puddleshark

View of Poole Harbour & Arne on a cold, wet & windy January morning.

Last year, I read about the opening of a new footpath, The Cordite Way, which runs from the edge of Holton Heath industrial estate out to the edge of Poole Harbour, along what used to be the line of the railway used to transport cordite (the propellant in artillery shells) from the Royal Naval Cordite Factory to a nearby jetty.

Parked the car along a random road in the industrial estate, behind another car in case it got lonely. Very carefully inspected the road for yellow lines & restricted parking notices. (One parking ticket a week is plenty). I've never visited Holton Heath industrial estate before, and it is full of impressively large & mysterious units, all spookily silent and deserted on a Sunday morning, and their gates padlocked.

Most of the units are featureless metal-clad boxes...

...but someone got a bit creative with this one.

Found my way to the edge of the industrial estate, where the start of the Cordite Way is clearly marked, beside the Jade-Aden unit ("for all your steel & cladding needs"). The footpath runs through pine woods and rhododendron, alongside the railway track, with glimpses of Poole Harbour beyond the track and the trees. Every half hour or so, a train rushes past, half seen, in pale South Western Railway livery, with a sound like an angry ghost.

Through oak and birch woods.

The Royal Naval Cordite Factory, Holton Heath (RNCF) was set up at Holton Heath, Dorset, England, in World War I to manufacture cordite for the Royal Navy. It was reactivated in World War II to manufacture gun propellants for the Admiralty. Holton Heath was chosen in 1914 because of its remote location, away from centres of population, and its good transportation links, on a backwater of Poole Harbour, adjacent to the London and South Western Railway. A jetty, Rockley Jetty, was also constructed in Poole Harbour just outside the main site. It was used to load Cordite onto boats for transport to Priddy's Hard, in Gosport.

Production of Cordite required large volumes of the solvent acetone and this was in short supply. A full-scale acetone plant was set up at the RNCF using bacterial fermentation of grain. By 1917 there was a shortage of grain so horse chestnuts were used as an alternative source of starch. School children were asked by the Ministry of Munitions to collect horse chestnuts, and six huge storage silos were built to store them.

During the Second World War, the site was a target for German bombers and so a plan to protect it was instigated. This consisted of creating several "Starfish" decoy sites in the village of Arne, three miles to the southeast, containing flammable material that would be ignited to give the appearance of a burning building. This was put to the test on the night of 3–4 June 1942 when bombers dropped hundreds of bombs on the decoy site, practically destroying the village of Arne, but leaving the Cordite Factory unscathed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Naval_Cordite_Factory%2C_Holton_Heath

Part of the old cordite factory site is now a nature reserve, heavily contaminated with asbestos, and with no public access. The rest of the site was reclaimed and the industrial estate built on it.

Admiralty View. This is as far as the footpath runs at the moment, to the site of a demolished railway bridge, (the demolition taking place just as a group of local volunteers were fighting a long battle to have the path declared a right of way). There are hopes to build a new bridge over the railway track so that the footpath can continue along the edge of the harbour to the jetty.

Sat for a while on the bench, hunched against the wind, with the rain falling into my coffee cup, admiring the... sheer miserable greyness of the morning. Well done, January! You surpass yourself.