You may think you've seen the last of winter by now, but March sometimes has a sting in its tail. Certainly this was the case in 1969, when thick snow fell across Scotland and much of the north of England in the middle of the month. Up on Emley Moor in Yorkshire, dense clouds swirled around on 19 March, enveloping the 386-metre tall TV mast – normally a prominent landmark. "The shrubs and trees around the station were like ships in bottles, they were like bubbles of ice, with the branches lying down on the ground," recalls mast engineer, David Lee.
Although the mist obscured the mast, Lee and his colleagues knew it was encased in ice, because dagger-like shards kept crashing down. By 3pm the ice had stopped falling, but on a whim they decided to keep the roads around the mast closed: a decision that probably saved lives. For at one minute past five the ice-laden mast came crashing over, with one of the guy-wires slicing through the local chapel like a cheese-cutter. "If I had opened the roads, as was suggested during the day, the local school bus would have been parked on the corner by the chapel," says Lee. As it was, two startled chapel caretakers had a very lucky escape.
Today a 330-metre high tapering concrete tower stands in its place – the tallest freestanding structure in the UK. It is a key TV transmitter, and, you'll be glad to hear, built to withstand the worst of British weather.