Crook’s Cold War Bunker

At a meeting of guided walks leaders at County Hall the other night, somebody called Ian asked me if I knew of a Royal Observer Corps bunker at Sunniside, on the hill above Crook. I didn’t but it seems an ideal place for an observation post because the view from up there is enormous.
A Google search this morning provided a list of all the ROC posts in the UK with their grid references, including the one at Sunniside, helpfully labelled “Tow Law”.

So, after lunch, including the ritual snooze through the second half of the Politics show, me and LTD wandered off to have a look. Its quite a nice walk, and a bit longer than this week’s doggy walks have been due to yours truly having had an attack of Man Flu and been laid up without whisky till today.
And we found the bunker, just next to the road to Tow Law in a little wire mesh compound looking just like the bunkers in the pictures on roc heritage posts map
The Tow Law post operated from 1958 to 1991.

I had a little poke around inside the compound which wasn’t locked but I didn’t go into the post since it involved a  20 foot climb down a ladder and I had LTD with me and he would have had to be abandoned up top.

The post isn’t in a very good condition. There’s hundreds of these poists in the UK according to the map but nevertheless we should be looking after these things a bit better, partly because they’re part of our history, and you never know when we might need them again (!). But mainly because they’re part of our history. And we can save future archaeologists the bother of digging them up if we preserved them a bit better.  Tow Law has had some damage.

The Tow Law post is also on private land with no right of way going to it, so I did a little naughty trespass to get there. There was no stock in the field, though, and there are no obstacles between the nearest public footpath and the stockade, so no damage or harm was done. Here's a quick 16 second view of the..er...view from ROC Tow Law