Snettisham Patrol

The OB is located in a private woodland. Accessed by kind permission of the Estate Manager.

According to the Defence of Britain report, the OB has been destroyed. It is described as having consisted of a Nissen hut type chamber which had a wooden floor. It was accessed through a ladder down a drop-down shaft that was covered by a concealed trap door. The building materials used are described as having been corrugated iron and wood. This information cannot be verified.

The OB site is located about 50 yards distant from a track traversing Ken Hill Wood, roughly from north to south. The ground currently is overgrown with brambles. We found a roughly rectangular depression (about 1m deep at the deepest spot), with a rhododendron bush growing at its north-west end, where a short trench-like depression leads away from it, slightly uphill.

An intact ceramic vent pipe emerges from the ground from above where we believe the main chamber would have been, near the northern edge of the structure. The pipe is stuck solidly in the ground and it appears to have sunken lower together with the surrounding soil as a consequence of the roof of the main chamber underneath it having collapsed. For safety reasons the remains of the structure (including contents) were bulldozed and covered with earth by the landowner in the late 1960s.

Mr George Kite, a forestry worker whom we met near the site, by a lucky coincidence, informed us that he was shown the OB by Robert Claxton (brother of Patrol member Walter Claxton) when he was a teenager (in the early 1960s). The OB was reached by walking down a short incline leading to the entrance, and accessed through a not very deep drop-down shaft. At this time the structure was intact and still accessible. It had four wooden bunks, arranged along its sides, as well as soot-blackened candle holders made from tin (possibly army issue), all still in place.