In Torbay, there’s a road called “Pine Line” and it runs from Torbay Road to Logy Bay Road.

There are no pine trees on it.

It’s rather a nice addition to a running route as it’s mostly flat-ish and not entirely straight. I travel it pretty often during longer runs and it’s a nice round-about detour when skirting traffic snarls on the main roads.

It’s named after the Pinetree Line, a series of Cold War-era radar stations that spanned the 50th parallel (or thereabouts) and one of which was at Red Cliff in Logy Bay (this is an excellent site, with marvellous photos!).  The station there has a longer history, once having been a WWII artillery station and later having been refurbished and used as an unmanned radio communications centre.

Note: Pine Line doesn’t lead directly to the site, if ever it actually did; you have to take Red Cliff Road out off Marine Drive to get there now. I believe Pine Line was put through to connect the airforce base at RCAF Rd with the Red Cliff station.

It’s a pretty nifty place. Excellent for exploring and apparently very popular for paint-ball. These photos were taken with my Sony DSC-HX5V point and shoot camera.

Katherine and Jasper and I took a wander through a couple of years ago.

Since I had kids with me, I didn’t poke to far into any of the buildings.

I’d really like to go back now that I’ve read a bit more about what’s there. So many of the ruins are choked over with alder bushes and there are aspects that I didn’t photograph at the time.

It was a fascinating set of ruins, made all the more interesting by their relative recentness. The radar dome building was perhaps the most intriguing.

The kids thought so, too!

I’ll head back again this spring, before the growth crowds everything out and see what can be seen.