Roof structure, storage shed, Midlothian

What was stored here is unknown. The radiation levels were elevated so we didn't explore for very long. We suspect that, after the end of the programme, partially-assembled reactor cores and RTGs may have been kept here, their shielding damaged or absent. There are artificial ponds nearby surrounded by triple fences which is probably their current resting places. The surface seethes and steams, heated continuously from beneath by some sleeping, deadly, horror left there for some future generation to clean up, if there will be future generations.

As with Chernobyl the radiation has not been entirely harmful to the local environment: the shed was a riot of curiously tropical vegetation (some visible here on the roof), together with brightly-coloured lizards and enormous, slowly-moving, jewel-bright butterflies. All this in the depths of winter: what must it be like in the summer.

I worry, however, that this extraordinarily-vigorous florescence may escape the walls of the shed and spread uncontrollably, slowly drowning the central belt (and, perhaps, beyond that) in a jewelled, faintly luminous, forest. Part of me wonders: would this be altogether an evil? A country with fewer humans and more butterflies, natural or otherwise, might seem a blessing, not a curse.

We will try to return here in the summer.