Devil’s Den, Demolished

It’s a new year, and 2025 is starting off cold. It’s been below freezing for the last few days here, but today it’s dipped down right to -5. This morning dawned bright and frosty but with a delightfully spooky mist so I was pondering where to go for a walk when I remembered it had been quite a while since I’d been up to Devil’s Den. I realised that today would be a perfect day for another look – you see, my route there takes me across two farmed fields which have rather rudimentary paths that can be extremely unpleasant to walk. The slightest bit of rain and they turn into the most horrendously claggy mud-baths you can imagine. The last time I went over, my boots ended up twice their normal size from accumulated clay and were so heavy I could hardly lift my feet. However, all of that would be frozen solid today so I dug out my thermal layers, my thickest fleece and my Iceland-proof coat, and set off for a freezing adventure to take a look at how the ruins are looking now.

(Before I go on, if you’d like to remind yourself of how Devil’s Den looked before, I’ve shared pictures from when it was just an abandoned and derelict farm here, and from the day after it burned down here. Oh, and I wrote a story about it too!)

What had been mist at home was thick fog over the fields, and no, the frozen mud didn’t stick to my boots, but it had solidified into brick-hard, ankle-mangling giant clods that tested my balance and took a bit of negotiating! But I got there, and goodness, the sight took my breath away. The farmhouse is gone. There’s just a devastating empty expanse of rubble where it used to stand. The adjoining barn is still upright, just, but with the wall ripped away you can see right through to the insides and it looks seriously unstable. I didn’t see anyone inside the security fence, but it’s been cut into so I think there have been people squatting there: you’d have to be desperate indeed to try and seek shelter in such a bleak and unwelcoming place. Walking up the path to the old entrance, I couldn’t help remembering the first time I’d come across the farm last March and it seems a heck of a lot longer than a handful of months. I had been so excited by my ‘discovery’ that day – I wasn’t lost exactly, no-one really is these days as long as they’ve got Apple Maps and a reasonably decent signal, but I was trying to find a shortcut back home, and thought this way looked promising. I had no idea there was anything up at the end of the cracked road and then suddenly, there was the old farm in all its boarded-up tumble-down glory. What a delight that was.

No more. Apparently, there’s been a farm here since the 17th century, and some sort of settlement for much longer than that. It’s part of the old bones of MK that fascinate me so much, part of a history that might be hidden under the concrete now but it’s still there, just patiently waiting to be found. For now, the Devil’s Den site is silent and still. The frost has thickly iced the rubble, decorated the fire line tape with frosty spikes, painted the branches of the ancient apple trees with silver. Soon, the developers will be back to take down the security fences and put up construction hoardings instead. The cracked road will be broken up and re-paved for easy access. A bulldozer will be set on those precarious barns and they’ll all be torn down too. Afterwards, what’s left of the bricks and the glass, the chunks of fire-twisted metal and the few old beams that are still left, they’ll all be hauled away. This land will be marked out into plots for dozens of tiny executive homes, and the construction will commence. When that does, I’ll still visit – I like the idea of documenting month by month what rises literally from the ashes – but it will be with a heavy heart because I’ll be able to remember what it was like to stand here in the drawn silence of an unloved site, listening for the whispers of its ghosts.