I Bet You Didn't Know These 25 Restricted Areas in the UK

One Scottish island was so saturated with anthrax that Britain fenced it off for 48 years — and you can see it from a public road. Beneath Whitehall sits a £126 million command bunker almost nobody has laid eyes on, still running today. There's a 35-acre underground city built in secret to keep the government alive through nuclear war, that waited in the dark and was never used. And there's a six-mile path across tidal sands that has drowned more than a hundred people, still a legal right of way. In this video, we explore: → RAF Menwith Hill near Harrogate, where 36 giant white spheres — locals call them the golf balls — hide satellite antennas, run by the American NSA on British moorland and described as the largest electronic monitoring station on Earth → Sealand, a rusting wartime sea fort 11km off Suffolk that a former army major occupied in 1967 and declared an independent nation, complete with its own passports, stamps, and self-appointed royal family → St Kilda, the most remote spot in the British Isles, where the last 36 residents were evacuated in 1930 after centuries of habitation — now home to a £40 million MoD radar station instead → Mynydd Epynt in Wales, where the War Office cleared 200 Welsh-speaking farmers off their land in 1940 and the language never returned to the plateau → Orford Ness in Suffolk, where Britain tested atomic bomb triggers inside concrete buildings with upturned roofs — shaped so an accidental blast would vent straight up — that locals called the pagodas → Cape Wrath in Scotland, the only place in the Northern Hemisphere where NATO drops live 1,000-pound bombs, with a target island chosen because it's the size of an aircraft carrier → The Broomway off Essex, a path older than the Romans that runs 440 yards out across sands the tide swallows fast — parish records log over 100 drownings, and it's still a public right of way → Imber on Salisbury Plain, where 150 villagers were given 47 days to leave in 1943 for D-Day training, promised they could return, and never were — the empty houses still stand along one road → Dounreay in Caithness, where over 2,300 radioactive particles have been recovered from the seabed and a beautiful beach just north of the plant has yielded more than 200 of them → Windscale in Cumbria, where a reactor burned for three days in 1957 and the Prime Minister personally buried the report to protect Britain's nuclear standing with America — the site runs today under a different name And at number one: an island in a Highland bay, visible from the road, where the military detonated anthrax bombs on tethered sheep in 1942. The spores didn't die. They sat in the soil for nearly half a century before anyone dared go back — and the story of what was finally done to it, and where it ended up, is the note this list closes on. Subscribe for more of Britain's hidden geography.