VIRTUAL TOUR Part Ten: Boiler Room & Yard

We are now inside The Boiler Rooms - the industrial heart of the CRCMH. The original blueprints for these rugged buildings will be appearing on this website soon. In addition, there's already a number of interior shots elsewhere on the site, so we won't hang around here long. I'll just add that basically, these rooms are full of raised platforms and gullies - and the two huge boilers are still very much in place (you can see one of them here on the right). The available lighting in here is rather poor too, so mind you don't trip over anything and land in all that tar stuff. I think we'll move outside where it's a little brighter.

Well - You've seen them a million times before, and no doubt, they were the first thing you even noticed about the CRCMH. But no tour of the boiler room are would be complete without at least a glimpse of the giant smokestacks which rise above the yard here. If the hospital had a trademark, then this would be it - unmistakably CRCMH. A truly daunting sight - and the skyline of the forest will never look the same again if they tear them down.

Slightly lower than the chimneys, but still fairly high up, you'll notice these huge doors which presumably open up onto the yard. It makes you think "what on earth did they used to get up to here?"...perhaps. But it gets stranger. Much stranger.

Warning - Explosives! is scrawled on the wall in gothic German script. Well, not so much scrawled as lovingly crafted. I really wish we could tie up this "Patton" thing - there's German writing everywhere. To say that it all adds ambience to the place is an understatement. It's enough to take you back to Nazi Germany - even if you were never there in the first place.

And here's more of it - at the Western end of the yard. It says what appears to be Bersorgungslager and I can't figure out for the life of me what that's supposed to mean. So if any of you know a thing or two about German...

...and Lo & Behold - it seems that some of you do (hurrah!):

Daniel Beardsall writes:

By way of thanks for the site, I used my GCSE in German to translate that text for you, the one towards the end of the tour. Bersorgungslager without the first 'R' translates as "provisions store" or something along those lines. Hope that sheds some light on things.

Tina Bruch (who I think may be slightly more German) writes:

Hi - I just took the virtual tour of the CRCMH (lovely place by the way) and noticed that you wonder what Bersorungslager means. It's actually Versorungslager and it means supply depot.

Thanks guys for that - and now I think we get the idea. If you'd like to see a better quality version of the strange text, there's a good photo of it on the Wire Jesus Collection page of the Photographs section once you get back to the main part of the site.

Still, back to the tour. At the Western end of the yard, you can see that Lucas, Isaac and Alaric are feeling somwhat parched now and wouldn't mind heading off home for a nice cup of tea and a slice of coffee (or indeed a frothing pint or two of Bersorgungslager). So, what we'll do is head out through the yard. This is pretty much the closest point of the buildings to the entrance wall, so it's a fairly convenient place to conclude a hard days exploration.

Even Ormrod-Spink is looking weary as he examines the assorted junk inside what has now become a car scrap yard. It's temping to say that there's more junk here than in the rest of the hospital put together - but that might be exaggerating just a tad.

And through the gate we go, out into the open expanse on the Eastern side of the grounds - leaving an awful lot of rubbish behind us. Thankfully, we weren't responsible for any of it. Shame on you NHS, shame...

But keep on walking - you're not quite home yet.