During the summer months, from 1958 on, my younger brother David Ian and I would make our way down to Crow Nest, Lightcliffe, which we knew as Salt's Mansion.
There was one, or possibly two, Ducks, or DWKs, or something of the sort, wooden landing craft anyway, falling apart.
The Mansion itself, even as small and very adventurous boys, was far too dangerous to contemplate.
There was an external architectural feature, a limestone aviary. The structure had been reduced to a handful of ground floor walls and the ground floor itself was the dangerous bit.
Huge slabs of stone that had tilted across metal girder supports and perhaps even some screw stressed rods.
We never even went near to look into the cellars.
There were some outbuildings a little way up the slope to the quarries which were used by Tony Wilson as a pig farm. Tony had been a friend of my father's before the war, a smart young man, and jungle warfare in Burma, I believe, had left him in a state where he wasn't going to prosper. He lived at the bottom of Bramley Lane. He had a Pig Swill Boiler, quite a decent size. He served the country and should be remembered.
One unanswered question in my mind is that there was a brick-built underground tunnel constructed with a rounded radiused bottom, a sewer, running down to the Mansion, on the higher quarry side, about 12 feet down. There were 3 surface access holes and I went down with a torch to have a look at least twice – it was all perfectly clean.
I'm quite sure that it's still there even if the current owners say it isn't
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Malcolm Bull 2017 /
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Revised 12:24 on 3rd February 2017 / m_24 / 5