page_title: Monkton Farleigh
section_title: CAD Monkton Farleigh
hierarchical_section_title: Monkton Farleigh / CAD Monkton Farleigh
caption_attribution_description: English: Bottom of 20 District Slope Shaft 20 District of the ammunition depot also falls within this grid square, here is a photo taken in the early 1980's before any real damage has been done. The picture shows the conveyor heading to the shaft with a step over point, an office on the left and the barrier around the sewage ejector on the right. The trunking on the ceiling was for the air conditioning.
context_page_description: Monkton Farleigh is a village and civil parish in west Wiltshire, England, on high ground 3 miles northwest of Bradford-on-Avon, and a similar distance east of the city of Bath. The parish includes the hamlets of Farleigh Wick and Pinckney Green. In the west and northwest the parish is bounded by Somerset.
  It is known for its underground mines of Bath Stone, which were converted into one of the largest Ministry of Defence underground ammunition stores in the country.
context_section_description: In the 1930s, it was recognised that there was a need to provide secure storage for munitions across the United Kingdom. The proposal was to create three Central Ammunition Depots (CADs): one in the north (Longtown, Cumbria); one in the Midlands (Nesscliffe, Shropshire); and one in the south, namely CAD Monkton Farleigh, which was also known as CAD Corsham.
  The easily hewn Bath stone, a form of limestone, had created a number of large, horizontal, and relatively dry quarries around Corsham. Monkton Farleigh quarry was renovated from the late 1930s by the Royal Engineers as one of the three major depots.
  In November 1937 the Great Western Railway were contracted to build a 1,000 feet (300 m) long raised twin-loading platform at Shockerwick, between Box and Batheaston, with two sidings from the adjacent Bristol-London mainline branching off just outside the eastern entrance to the Box Tunnel at 51°24′19.31″N 2°17′22.94″W. 30 feet (9.1 m) below and at right angles to this point, the War Office had built a narrow gauge wagon sorting yard. This was attached by a 1.25 miles (2.01 km) tunnel built by The Cementation Company, descending at a rate of 1:8.5 to the Central Ammunition Depot, housed in the former mine workings. The whole logistics operation was designed to cope with a maximum of 1,000 tonnes (1,100 tons) of ammunition a day.
  The narrow gauge trucks would descend from the platform to the tunnel, where a heavy-duty conveyor belt would propel the ammunition directly to the appropriate storage gallery. At any given time the depot was either taking in ammunition or sending it out, never both simultaneously. The construction design meant that an explosive accident or detonation inside any one of the stores would not propagate throughout the ammunition storehouse. The conveyor belt, and the original cable-way used as a temporary installation while the tunnel was being built, ran continuously for 30 days in the run-up to D-Day.
  CAD Monkton Farleigh closed at the end of hostilities, although was kept in an operational condition until the 1950s. The sidings were then cleared, and not used again until the mid-1980s when a museum opened for a short period on the site. Today the north end of the tunnel is sealed by a concrete and rubble installation, while the former mine/CAD is used for secure commercial document storage.
caption: District 20 of the depot, showing the conveyor for moving munitions
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