Help on Merley House aka Merley Park, near Wimborne Minster, Dorset, UK. (1 Viewer)

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pattle

Senior Airman
692
20
May 11, 2013
I will be very surprised if I get any replies on this one. Back when I was a nipper I remember playing in the woods behind the Flight Refuelling Social Club at Merley near Wimborne Minster. The thing that attracted my friends and I to these woods were the World War Two structures that they contained, these structures included pill boxes, blast walls and tank traps, a lot of these structures were pretty overgrown but I remember that even so my friends and I did our best to explore them. This has always stuck in my mind and so a few years ago I went back to inspect them, unfortunately they had been removed and houses had been built on the spot they once stood.
So my search moved to google, the only things that I can find are the following, Merley house was used first by the British and then by American Army during the war and was also used as a PoW camp for both Germans and Italians. While I can find very little on the British Army's time at Merley House, I have discovered a reasonable amount of information on its use as a PoW and US Army camp, I was most interested to discover that it had been used as a base for US Army spotter planes.
What I am really interested in finding out is why these structures that my friends and I once played on were built, I can only think that they were built for some kind of training purpose as I can think of no other reason why such a jumble of mixed fortifications and obstacles would have been placed in such a spot. From memory the structures definitely included dragons teeth and blast walls both early war, the other structures I am not sure of. The site does still contain some traces of it's wartime history such as the foundations for water tanks etc, there is also one large industrial building that interests me.
Any info would be welcome as I have been curious about this for years.
 

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