Home of the US Army's 96th General Hospital Unit, 1944–1945

Little could you have guessed what the previous use of this site could have been. Maybe as you walked along the path through the trees you might have wondered why you were walking on an old tarmac road edged by a perfectly straight line of trees. Or maybe you might have found it strange that there was a long straight hedge running across the site.

In 1944 a newly formed unit moved from Camp Maxey in Texas, USA, to here. They believed that they were going to be a surgical hospital but on arrival they were told that they were going to be a neuro-psychiatric hospital. In the 18 months that they were here the hospital dealt with a large number of troops suffering with battle fatigue or shell shock.

After the 96th General Hospital US Army Unit left, the site continued to be used for medical reasons. In the 1950s it was a TB hospital and then from the 1960s till 1986 a psychiatric hospital. It wasn't until 1997 that the site re-opened as a nature reserve. Unfortunately with the final change of use almost all signs of it's history were removed, just leaving a few clues to its past.

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Europe / UK-England

Lat: 52° 4' 6.58" N
Long: 3° 20' 4" W

Elevation: 226 ft

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Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Taken with a Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8G fisheye lens. Mounted on a Nodal Ninja 5 panorama head atop a Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod. Shots taken at 6 positions 60° apart, tilted 15° down and another shot taken looking straight up. Raw files then processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 before being stitched together using PTGui Pro 8.3.10 / PTStitcherNG 0.7b and converted to a QTVR Cube using Pano2VR 2.3.4.