The huge mast everyone can see from M62 - which used to be vital part of nuclear attack warning system
13.03.2022 - 15:35
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
Everyone who has driven along the M62 will have seenit at some point or another.
Standing proud on the border of Rochdale and Oldham, it has been part of the landscape for as long as most people can remember - but not many people know the full history of the huge Saddleworth mast.
The transmitter stands around 300 feet tall, overlooking the surrounding moorland and the highest point of the M62 motorway. However, it’s not the location that makes this communications tower so interesting.
Whether you call the stretch of ground it’s on Windy Hill or Saddleworth, there’s a very impressive history unveiled in part by a former top secret paper from the Post Office.
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Created to discuss the impact of a nuclear attack on the communications system, the report from July 1956 outlined a “backbone” system created for “defence purposes” running up and down the country.
During the peak of the Cold War unrest, the threat of nuclear war was on everyone’s minds, and precautions were being taken to ensure the UK was prepared for whatever was about to come.
As such, the country wanted to be prepared, putting plans and systems into place in the event the worst happened.
The Post Office, which later had its communications branch taken over by BT, outlined the backbone link as a method of communication “avoiding large towns and designed to provide as safe a route as possible for communications vital to the prosecution of a war”, before outlining several sites that had been picked out for the radio stations.
Stations would broadcast using microwave frequencies, with small cone-line "horns" that picked up and emitted signals that travelled in "line of sight" - a straight line