Heelychat, the forum for heelys, the shoes with wheels - View topic

Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 1391 Location: UK

Whilst trekking through some of the dense forest near my house, I came across this weird ruined house that nobody seems to know anything about as it isn't on any map. The area is so overgrown that you'd never know it was there until you were right on top of it, and it's like 5 miles from any village so nobody would usually have any reason to pass there.

How spooky is that? Very Happy

The coolest thing about it is that it seems to be half built into a cliff face - It was treacherous going with all the overgrown ground etc, but I managed to get up on the higher ground surrounding it to get a pic from above:

Maybe it's where Robin Hood used to hide out? LOL

Joined: 22 Feb 2007 Posts: 1548 Location: Ohio

HOLY CRAP

I want to explore that place so much....maybe I'll show it to TAPS and they can check it out Very Happy

Joined: 18 Mar 2008 Posts: 291 Location: Washington, USA

that is really cool!!! I'd love to stumble on somthing like that!

Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 1391 Location: UK

Yeah, one of my other hobbies when I lived in the city used to be urban exploration - snooping around in places I shouldn't Very Happy

Now that I'm out in the country i do the same thing but obviously the venues are diff.

I remember now that's part of what got me into heeling: i was looking up stuff on free-running and parkour (they're different things) and followed some links on Free Walking, for which some people use Heelys, and I thought, hey, I could try that as practise to get onto the more extreme stuff like Parkour - little did I know Heeling could be pretty extreme too Smile

When I first moved out to this countryside area my job sent me back into the city once for some training courses on how to be a better leader, and one of the things they did to teach us was blindfold us and drive us out to "the middle of nowhere" and leave us with nothing but a map, and we first had get to high ground to figure out where we were from whatever landmarks we could spot so that we could make our way to where we needed to be: what they didn't realise was that the "middle of nowhere" place they dropped us in was not far from my house, and i'd been exploring those woods for the past year LOL - so naturally I scored rather well on that test.

Anyway, my point is, on that day when they dropped us in the woods, we were trying to get to the rendezvous point, and we were taking a route people wouldn't normally take through some woods, not far from that place pictured above, and on this route, me and the six other people in my unit came across these three weird little old houses - they had stone walls just like the building above, probably same era of construction, but they still had roofs (thatched) that were mostly intact, if a bit holey in places. And the weirdest thing was that inside these 3 houses was still a load of old furniture and shit from like 50 years ago - all rotting and burned in some places (obviously kids had been there). But going into those houses it was like stepping back in time, clearly nobody had lived there in like 4 or 5 decades, and they'd just left a load of old junk. I thought that was weird as hell, because in the city, places don't stand dormant for long: sooner or later someone wants to use that land to redevelop and build something else like a new mall or whatever. What I came to realise was that out here there's so much free space that re-using land occupied by old buildings isn't such a priority - you'll often see whole factories just closed up and left with whatever stuff couldn't be sold still inside - the kids usually break in first so i can just use the same entrance they made, that way I'm not breaking any laws (in the UK there is no "trespass" law if you just happen to walk in or the door is unlocked, they can only charge you if you break or steal something). I got a ton of pics of weird old places like that.

But yeah, these 3 old houses I found, they are the reason I found that place above: in the 5 or so years since I found those houses, I've never been able to find them again. You see on that day we were against the clock to win against other teams, so we only did a very quick recon of the dwellings, but I've always wanted to go back and explore them properly, but have never been able to find them since, since we didn't know exactly where we were when we found them - and the trees and stuff change so quick in that kinda place. If I could I would have left some kind of markers to track back to them, but of course the exercise meant we were left with very little equipment.

If it wasn't for the fact that the other people in my team saw the houses with me I'd think I'd dreamed them - one day I swear I'll find those bloody houses - it was like something out of the Blair Witch project Laughing

I've done a bit more research on the structure above, and a guy who's the head of a local historical society tells me not much is known, but it was once used as a hospital for people dying of plague, and they were buried on the next hill over Surprised

- he said it's private land, but the direction I approached it from was not from the usual paths so I didn't see any signs. Smile

He says it was last used in 1948 - if you ask me it looks like it hasn't been usable in a lot longer than that eh? Smile

lol, Hey honey, lets go explo--- (gets eaten by a plague infected zombie)

or worse...

You contract the plague while exploring...

DIBS ON ME'S WHEELS WHEN HE'S GONE

lol, just jokin... But if you do keel over, seriously, dibs on your wheels lol

Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 1391 Location: UK

ROFL

Don't you worry bud, out of all my family when they get colds i never seem to get anything: I'm have an immune system that could kick Chuck Norris' Ass Very Happy