Tag: bulkhead

#365daysofbiking A solved mystery

May 18th – Cutting back over Brownhills Common I remembered that I’d not recorded a mystery I solved a couple of months ago (because my photos then were too poor) – so I paid the site of a recovered childhood memory a visit.

When I was a child I remember walking over the common many times with my father, between the Chester Road, Parade and Watling Street School. I remember back then there being a fair sized, man made pool, surrounded by crunchy gravel, that in spring had frogspawn in it. At one end of the pool was a concrete rectangular bulkhead with a blue pipe protruding that trickled clear water into the pond.

There is no pool today, no gravel. I have looked for evidence of the pool on maps, aerial images and spoke to people about it. The only person I ever found who recalled it was fellow Brownhills historian David Hodgkinson.

Mooching over the common in spring, I nearly suffered a spill coming off a track by the corner of woodland into a ditch. Seeing a concrete block formed the edge of the ditch, I made a discovery.

It is certainly the concrete bulkhead I remember. It has a ten inch vitreous pipe in the centre, the protruding part smashed away, although it clearly once projected from the surface. The inside of the pipe is blue.

The site of the pond is now a copse, and bone dry. but it’s still a hollow.

I was astounded to find the site of this, which I’d convinced myself was a false memory.

Now, the site and pipe are clearly many years dry. I wonder who created it, and why?

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February 27th – I had to pop into Aldridge on my way home and had ridden up Coppice Lane; not far from the gas turbine and leechate plant, another sign of a dirty underground secret from the past. This square compound on wind and mud-blasted wasteland, just off the rear entrance to the Ibstock Brick plant, is a breather for the mines underneath the area that were used as a dumping receptacle for millions of gallons of industrial toxic waste a couple of decades ago.

Inside this well-locked square palisade fence, a bulkhead is fitted to a borehole that goes hundreds of feet underground and allows gasses to vent to the atmosphere from the sludge within. The breather itself is from a tall pipe, well above human head height, up where the wind can quickly disperse anything nasty.

It’s sobering, and a bit chilling; and indicator that beneath this area there is an unknown quantity still requiring monitoring and care. But the ground it is in is surrounded in clay and favourable, and as time passes, the content should settle.

There are several of these installations in the local area – finding them is an interesting, if slightly unnerving challenge.