Our neighbours Nottinghamshire Orienteering Club are allowing us to hold our Club Championships on this fascinating area, just east of Mansfield
When I ran at Strawberry Hill in January 2020, I was struck with the elegance of the buildings in Ransom Wood Business Park, the location of the event parking. Sure enough, a quick search revealed that the wooden building on the footprint of the current brick building was a TB hospital built in 1902. The photo shows one of the five wards, with wooden verandahs where the patients would sleep in the fresh air. It seems there were plenty of blankets for warmth, and the main complaint was the nightjars keeping them awake! The out-of-bounds area in the NW corner of the map is protected habitat for these curious birds.
The wooden buildings were replaced in around 1947 with brick ones, but only the central quadrangle of the actual hospital remains.
The clock was presented to the hospital on 1 May 1947, so it’s assumed that the clocktower was built at the same time. Read the plaque; they say that time heals all things.
The hospital closed in 1987, due to subsidence affecting the surrounding wards. These areas now provide ample parking for the business park.
Strawberry Hill Plantation
The area is named after a plantation of sessile oaks, surrounded by a circular walkway some 190m in diameter. The trees are thought to have been planted in the 1850s, when the Welbeck Estate – home of the Lords of Portland – was ‘gentrifying’ itself. The southern approach is a sunken lane, and many more of these cross the area, some dating from medieval times.
The area was used for military training in both the World Wars:
“Strawberry Knoll was known for the two heavy machine guns mounted on its summit known particularly well by the soldiers who had to crawl up that hill under live ammunition fire as a final part of their training. A local retired post-master tells of how his father used to make deliveries to our site in around 1913 and of how he recalled that you couldn’t see the trees for the troops that streamed through this site at the time and how he remembered two tanks parked up in the car park.”
The Lidar image for a 2021 archaeological survey by Nottinghamshire County Council shows the wartime legacy nicely.
I look forward to my run on December 21st – I hope I don’t find the ghosts too distracting!
By Sal Chaffey
