Location: - It is suggested that anyone wishing to visit a World War II radar site within the Regional Municipality of Halifax should make use of a city map. With this in mind we begin by using the Shearwater Museum, situated on the old Shearwater naval base as our starting point. The airbase is well marked on a Halifax Municipality map.
From the Shearwater Museum turn right on Pleasant street and drive west until you reach the corner of #111 highway and Pleasant Street. The distance is not important here as #111 is four lane and well marked. Turn right on Highway 111 proceed along until you reach exit #7 East. You are now on #207 east which is also Portland Street and eventually Cole Harbour Road. When you reach Bell Ayr Ave turn left and again almost immediately left again onto Swanton Drive. On your left you will see a sign indicating The Abenaki Aquatic Club. The club is located down a short drive or lane way surrounded by a chain link fence, however an unobstructed view may be had from your advantage point outside of the fence.
General Detail: - I peered through the fence and thought, is this it? We are down in a gully at a small lake and what I thought would be a very unlikely spot for a radar site. Even stranger than Plymouth as here I was surrounded by high ground on all four sides. I walked along the east side of the fenced until I reached nearly the end of the lake, the fence had long stopped and continued west towards the lake blocking off any way to reach the docks as they were on the south side of the fence.
Directly above me would be the corner of Swanton Drive and Dorthea Drive on high ground a good 200 meters up a steep bank which is the backs of all the property along these streets. The back yards of these homes has been terraced and contain vegetable gardens, storage buildings, bar-b-que pits and children's play items. All very well landscaped lawns and gardens in a very good section of the city with a view of the lake out the back doors.
This is where the radar site was located. Down by and in the lake were very large pieces of cement blocks some measuring three meters square or more. Many of these have iron rods sticking out the sides where cables have been attached. When these homes were built or sometime before, the remnants of the Bell Lake Radar site was bulldozed over the bank and into Bell Lake. A sad end to another RCAF installation.
Epilog: - I managed to make a return trip to Bell Lake on Thursday, 4th of November, 2004. I had a good look at the picture that is on the web site before I drove in and tried to visualize where the site would have been. It is my opinion that in 1942 or whenever the radar site was built that Swanton Drive did not exist. Bell Ayr Avenue then would have been a farm road into Mr Bell's property and the radar site was built beyond where Garnet Street is located now. I looked around between Dorthea Drive and Swanton Drive where a school and a church now exists. There is a lot of open ground there sitting on top of a flat spot. Just to the west of Dorthea and Swanton is where the houses are built. It would have been an easy matter to push the large cement blocks over into the lake from here.
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This page is located at
http://www.pinetreeline.org/rds/detail/rds2-7.html
Updated: November 9, 2004
