Local History - Action
Redcastle

Directly north from Lentran across the Beauly Firth lies the small hamlet of Redcastle. In a wooded estate nearby can be found various buildings which by their shape, and the fact that they are partly covered by grass turfs, look very like the old Anderson shelters. In fact these are the remains of a World War II ammunition dump.

With millions of tons of ammunition being produced during the war, storage became quite a problem. Apart from large storage depots smaller dumps had to be found, reasonably accessible to the user units but isolated enough for safety in case of accidents. 

In the early part of the war there was a complicated system of sending ammunition from factories to different depots which could involve nine stages of handling.

It soon became obvious that this was highly inefficient and from 1941 onwards it was more usual to send the ammunition from the factories direct to an AAP, many of which were built all over the country.  Redcastle was the furthest north of the AAPs and the choice of this remote area would have made sense at the time, as there was a small railway station at Kilcoy about a mile away. This railway line which closed in 1963, ran from Fortrose to Muir of Ord and could therefore be used to transport bombs and depth charges to Alness and Evanton on the Cromarty Firth. 

The capacity of Redcastle was officially 5 Kilo Tons. This would normally be between 500 and 1000 tons of explosive.  Like other AAPs built at the time Redcastle would have consisted of shelter type buildings scattered throughout the woods and connected by sawdust of woodchip roads.

The huts are now the only remains of a unit which played an important though largely unrecorded part in the World War II air activities from the Moray Firth.