Time Rocks

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  Monkton Rudloe is about six miles from Bradford on Avon, but I was headed there via the Box Tunnel on the main line from London’s Paddington Station to Cardiff Central. Granddad had talked of the rumoured secret railway siding, deep underground inside the Box Tunnel. He’d said it was used to load navel munitions onto trains for delivery to the ports. I reasoned that if it really did exist and was not simply a local legend, it must be very difficult to hide such a thing, once you get close enough. Unless it had been completely bricked up after the war it should be possible to get in there. That could be my way into Monkton Rudloe’s old stone-mine, far beneath the palatial headquarters of the Mackenzie Carmichael Foundation. Granddad had told me that during the war it was, the biggest store of naval shells and TNT in the country. For all I knew there could still be old bombs and decaying, unstable explosives in there. Or was it now some sort of secret MCF research laboratory, or factory? Whichever it was, I knew I would be facing great danger.