Nancekuke Common is both an obstacle on the South West Coast Path and the site of a largely hidden military-industrial history. The memoir places the walkers beside its fenced airbase as they search for a place to sleep, then looks back to its wartime origins and chemical-weapons production, tracing a landscape where present-day fields and a radar base sit over histories of confinement, illness and belated acknowledgment.

The common on the walking route

By the time the walkers reach Nancekuke Common, their days have settled into a difficult rhythm: places to camp seem plentiful between morning and early evening, then disappear after six. The nights are growing longer and colder, and this day—despite being their earliest start—has become their longest. Exhausted and desperate to stop, they find the airbase rising to their left, its high steel fence narrowing their way to a strip of gorse and bramble. The land feels dead and still; the fence seems endless.

A shallow valley briefly appears to offer a campsite, but a man-made rubble dam blocks it on the landward side. Gorse, brambles and thistles have grown over the barrier, while water seeps through the surrounding ground and runs as ore-stained mud. The walkers continue as the light fades. Only when the fence turns inland and the airfield gives way to farmland and brassica fields do they find a corner of grass for the tent. They put it up in five minutes, heat a tin of soup and rest their throbbing legs, worn down by sand and fences. In the morning the cabbages look simply green, and holidaymakers are already arriving in the nearby valley of Portreath: the ordinary rural scene offers little sign of the site’s less visible history.

From RAF Portreath to chemical production

The airfield was originally built during the Second World War as RAF Portreath. By 1950 it was no longer needed and had been returned to the government. Using equipment brought back from Nazi Germany, the government then converted the site into a chemical-weapons production plant, operating as an offshoot of Porton Down. For two or three years it manufactured Sarin B alongside other chemical weapons.

The site’s history therefore changes the meaning of the fenced airbase encountered on the walk. It is not simply an expanse of restricted ground: the radar base occupies a former production site whose military uses extended from wartime aviation to the manufacture of nerve agent. The route’s immediate pressures—barbed boundaries, overgrown barriers and the difficulty of finding somewhere to rest—meet a longer history of land controlled and used for purposes largely beyond the walkers’ view.

Worker illness and official acknowledgment

An investigation reported forty-one deaths and a high incidence of serious illness among workers involved in Sarin B production. A 1970 study, “Sickness Experience at Nancekuke,” found that workers involved in the production were 33 per cent more likely than average to suffer serious illness and 50 per cent more likely to suffer respiratory disease, described in the account as a classic outcome of nerve-gas exposure.

The government initially denied responsibility for errors, suppressed the report and altered its conclusions, presenting the findings instead as a higher-than-expected level of absenteeism. In 1971 it admitted negligence and paid sufferers what the narrative describes as generous sums, around £120 each. The sequence—from illness, through the dilution of the findings, to an admission and modest compensation—makes the site’s history one not only of dangerous production but also of how evidence and responsibility were handled.

The later record extended beyond the workers’ illnesses. In 2000 the government finally admitted that machinery used to produce Sarin B had been dumped in mineshafts on the common; a cleanup began in 2003. This disclosure connects the chemical plant to the area’s older mining landscape, where shafts remained available as places to conceal industrial equipment. The cleanup marks official action, but it also confirms that the plant’s material legacy persisted long after production ended.

A layered landscape in the memoir

Nancekuke belongs to a wider coastal journey in which the walkers repeatedly encounter land reshaped by human use. Elsewhere, the memoir describes the ruined mining landscape around Geevor and the transformation of former industrial sites into attractions; it also recounts the requisition of Tyneham for military use and the unexpected flourishing of wildlife within the ranges. These places are not interchangeable, but together they give the coast a history that complicates any simple division between untouched nature and developed land.

At Nancekuke, that history is compressed into a single passage through the landscape: a fence that forces the walkers onward, wet and ore-stained ground, a field where they pitch their tent, and an airbase whose earlier production history becomes visible only through retrospective investigation. The contrast between the green cabbages in the morning and the account of Sarin B production is not evidence that the ground is harmless; it shows how little the surface scene alone can reveal. The common’s significance lies in that gap between what the walkers can see and what the site’s history records.