I grew up in the countryside on the edge of Oldham where it becomes Saddleworth. My house was surrounded by fields which were brilliant to play in. No street corners for me.
In the front field there were the remains of an old house - now merely a cellar open to the elements in the side of a hill. This was one of our many dens. My friend Damian and I cleared it out, put a roof on it made out of old plywood boards covered in grass and finally installed the piss pipe so we could urinate inside and it would drain outside. Very civilised as far as I was concerned. This den met an untimely end when one of the stinky goats decided that it wanted to eat the roof and promptly fell through it.
In the same field there was an old shed which we also made into a den. We found lots of old wire grates which we used to construct a run around for a local jack russell - I'm not sure how pleased he was with it but it entertained us. There was also, strangely, an overturned wooden boat which had briefly been used as a den by Damian before I was on the scene. It was on top of this boat one summer evening that I told my cousin Peter a horror story. The story naturally involved the boat itself and a thunder storm and was so clearly terrifying that Peter burst into tears and ran back to my folks house.
Continuing on the den theme there was also the cellar of my house. Originally accessed from a trap door under the stairs in my house however by the time we moved in a door had been put on the outside of the house and the stairs down into the cellar had been bricked up. Damian and I slowly but surely over a number of weeks removed a few bricks from the bottom of the stairs and managed to get into what was the old stone staircase. This is where we stashed porn magazines liberated from the local tip as well as other treasures. In the main body of the cellar there were old stone shelves built into recesses in the wall which had originally been a cold store for meat and other produce pre refrigerators. We however covered the front of these openings with wire mesh and connected this, via a dodgy old transformer, to the mains electricity. The reason for this was so that we could contain ghosts, behind the wire, once we caught them. Sadly the outcome was a couple of electrocutions and no ghosts.
In one of the fields at the back of our house was another derelict farm building only revealed by a hole in the ground which was a cellar entrance - do you see a theme here? When you ventured down the hole you found yourself in a brick room with rubble on the floor and a curved ceiling above. This place didn't last long as a den because it was a bit too spidery for us. We did have fun burning the spiders though.
The least successful dens were in the corrugated sheet metal garage at the back of my house. One was rubbish because it was actually on the roof of the garage - I wouldn't recommend it. No shelter from rain, a bit blowy and on a slope. Crap for a den really. The other was in the back of the garage. Damian and I set a fire in there one afternoon. My dad, upon seeing billowing smoke spewing forth from the front of the garage, ran in to rescue us without realising that we had escaped through the secret loose back panel once again to safety. I think he nearly died putting out the fire... He wasn't best pleased either way.
