Yardley Chase

Yardley Chase is a fairly large forest in Northamptonshire (England), which consists of two similar shaped forests, which are each about 6 miles long, and 2 miles wide, in places. The forests are about 3 miles south of Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire, and about 3 miles north of Olney in the Borough of Milton Keynes.

Military use

Yardley Chase contains some large concrete huts, about 12m (40 feet) long, and about 6-8m (20-25 feet) wide, which were used during World War II to store bombs. They continued in use after the war, until the 1990s when the Ministry of Defence shut them down when it became obvious that they would be useless in a nuclear war. The site was served by a branch of the Northampton-Bedford railway line and evidence of revetted tracks are still visible around the site which is only a few miles east of the former depot of the Northamptonshire Regiment and later Royal Pioneer Corps at Simpson Barracks in Wootton. The site also has numerous small bunkers within it and is criss-crossed by barbed wire fences once past the main perimeter. It has several tracks that lead to the various bunkers and fair amounts of military debris (mainly used pyrotechnics) scattered around it.

The Eastern munitions site is larger than its western neighbour and the bomb storage buildings, in addition to being less numerous, are also mostly surrounded by water-filled moats. The storage buildings at the western site are surrounded by earth banks. The eastern and western sites were connected by a rail track.

The site is nowadays used by Army and Air cadets, as well as the Territorial Army units for basic skills training and field-craft. This site is closed to the public.