Something slightly different this week. Just a mini explore of a little mystery that has been bothering me for some time now! Lets go explore and find out what it is.
Huge thanks to all the Team at the Friends of Clarendon Palace. Their amazing website can be found here: clarendonpalace.org.uk/
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Credit and thanks:
Filter: Snowman Digital and Beachfront B-Roll
Maps: Google Maps
Maps: National Library of Scotland
Maps: OS Maps. Media License.
Stock Footage: Storyblocks
Music: Storyblocks
Mistakes:
1. 600mm as opposed to 60mm.
As mentioned the Article by Rosalind Johnson:
The railway track at Clarendon Palace
Rosalind Johnson
Visitors to the palace site may notice to the south of the great hall a few bent pieces of track. This mysterious piece of abandoned railway dates from Tancred Borenius’ excavations between 1933 and 1939, but Borenius himself was not responsible for the track. John Charlton, his site supervisor, acquired it in July 1934, the second year of the works, to aid in the removal of spoil from the excavations.
Charlton spent £5 on what he described as a ‘light railway’ with two trucks, each holding 12 barrow loads. The expenditure had been authorised by Charlton on his own initiative, and he was careful to let Borenius know the advantages. With the unemployed men working on the site using the new railway and trucks, he promised Borenius that ‘we should make phenomenal progress’. Shortly afterwards he had a small windlass made to draw the trucks along in the absence of any unemployed men to work the railway.
The track, according to Douglas Jackson, was of the ‘Jubilee’ design. This was a fairly common design, found in most narrow gauge railways around Salisbury. Usually, as at Clarendon, it was a two-foot gauge, though the distorted condition of the surviving track makes it difficult to be certain; Jackson suggests it could have been a 600 millimetre gauge. The trucks were moved by hand; there were no locomotives, and no evidence of animals being used for haulage.
The railway itself can be seen, to the south of the great hall, on aerial photos of the palace site taken in 1935 and 1938. Jackson estimates that the length of visible track in 1938 would have been about 400 feet. It is possible that the track and trucks came from the Clarendon estate itself. Charlton’s letters to Borenius are silent as to where he sourced them, but in 1919 a sale catalogue listed, among the effects in a barn near the mansion house, a ‘portable railway-line, about 300 yards, and tip-waggons’. Could these have been languishing, unsold, in the barn for fifteen years? We know Charlton sometimes stayed with the Christie-Miller family, owners of Clarendon Park, so perhaps the Christie-Millers suggested to Charlton the potential benefits of their unused railway.
The excavations ended with the outbreak of war in 1939, and at some point the track was taken up. Some lengths were stacked near the great hall, others ended up in the spoil heap. The short length that survives today is the most visible reminder of the years of activity in the 1930s, which contributed so much to our knowledge of the palace.
Sources
Douglas Jackson, Narrow Gauge Railways Around Salisbury, South Wiltshire Industrial Archaeology Society, Historical Monograph 23 (2018).
T. B. James and A. M. Robinson, Clarendon Palace (Society of Antiquaries, 1988). Plates VI and IX are aerial photographs showing the railway.
Many thanks to Tom James for letting me look at his copies of John Charlton’s letters to Tancred Borenius, and for discussions on the railway.
Негізгі бет Ойын-сауық The Mystery Railway - This doesn't belong here!!
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