Cloughton Outstation

This Station was a dugout at The Hulley's Farm. Cloughton is situated approximately 4 miles north of Scarborough town centre.

Duncan Simpson first located this station in the 1980s. He recalled how he found it then; "The entrance had its cover mostly in place and a fine camouflage job it was. The shaft was adjacent to a partly broken down dry-stone wall and some of these stones had been cemented on to the upper surface of the shaft cover. These blended in well to the surrounding scatter from the wall. Any approach to the bunker could be made along the top of this low wall, so avoiding leaving any tell-tale footmarks in the grass. As we moved the cover to one side a piece of metal tube came in to view that was built through the structure of it; confirming to me what it was, from my recollection from ‘The Last Ditch’, of counterbalanced covers. The cover would have been operated by rolling a marble or ball bearing in to the tube to operate the mechanism hidden in the shaft. Regrettably no such mechanism survived, nor any traces of how or where it might have been attached".

The station had two rooms with air vents and cable ducts. The chambers are 4 foot by 4 foot and 4 foot by 9 foot. Amazingly very little seemed to have changed inside the bunker in the 40 year gap between trips. The chambers were seemingly still very sound, reasonably dry and the low bench was still there. Duncan suspects a set of shelves or a cupboard stood against the doorway and was located by a beam that slotted in to where a lintel might be expected. A close inspection of the slot suggests a very smooth surface, deliberately so, and far more so than if the slabs had been laid on a wood lintel that had subsequently rotted away or been knocked out.

Inside the second chamber there are ventilation tubes made from glazed ceramic drain pipes leading off in different directions plus the tube up to the surface for the aerial. On the initial site visit there were two unusual concrete blocks in the chamber, one of them has now gone. A very low bench type piece of furniture, almost a footstool but too long was alongside one wall. Whether it was original was anyone’s guess but it does seem very old and certainly as early as the period. An aerial array was found in a nearby tree.

A member of the Cross family - either George D Cross (1911) or his brother Arthur C Cross (1914) - from Grange Farm,  Staintondale, who was a keen radio ham, was involved and his family recalled him regularly disappearing in the direction of Cloughton.