RCAHMS Goes Underground with The One Show

12 January 2012

RCAHMS archaeological investigator Allan Kilpatrick is to feature on BBC One’s The One Show, leading a film crew into a secret Second World War fuel store.

Accessible only by hidden tunnels, the Inchindown facility was built between 1938 and 1941 as a bomb-proof underground store with the capacity to hold up to 32 million gallons of fuel.  A four mile long pipeline linked the depot to the Royal Naval dockyard and port facility at Invergordon.  One of three secret stores constructed in Britain, Inchindown would have served as the main source of fuel for the Navy had the nation’s ports been blockaded by Germany.

Once inside the facility, Allan and the film crew had to lie flat on trolleys to be pushed through a narrow 2.5m long access pipe into one of the six giant fuel tanks. Up to 237m long, 13m high and 9m wide, the largest tanks are longer than York Minister. This is the first time that the inside of Inchindown has ever been filmed.

 “The history of Inchindown is fascinating, and working with the BBC provides a great opportunity to tell its story to a wider audience” said Allan, who originally surveyed the fuel store for RCAHMS in 2009, and has since given guided tours of the building during Highland Archaeology Festival. “The scale of the place is awe-inspiring – it’s almost unbelievable to imagine that there is a space the size of six cathedrals carved out of solid rock inside a highland hillside.”

“The men who created Inchindown were sworn to secrecy - not even their families knew exactly what they were doing, but they asked no questions. Working on the site gave them tunnelling experience and as a result many of them went on to Hydro-Electric construction projects across Scotland.  Taking a film crew into this site for the first time will not only help tell the story of a remarkable place, but also of the remarkable people who worked around the clock to build it as part of the war effort.”

The One Show featuring Allan Kilpatrick and the Inchindown fuel store will be broadcast on Friday 20 January on BBC One at 7pm.