Treacle Mine Road Watch House

Treacle Mine Road Watch House
Name	Treacle Mine Road Watch House
Location	Treacle Mine Road
Owner
Use	Watch House
Appearance	recently rebuilt
Residents
Built
Founded by
Demolished	previously burned down by a dragon
Books	Guards! Guards!, Night Watch
Notes

Recently rebuilt, this historic watch house stands on Treacle Mine Road on the edge of the The Shades, a notoriously dangerous district. Formerly the only remaining Night Watch house at the time of Guards! Guards!, this watch house was Sam Vimes' first station. As a newly recruited copper, young Vimes reported to the incorruptible and shrewd Sergeant John Keel and to Captain Tilden, a good-hearted old stick-in-the-mud. It was subsequently burnt down by a vengeful dragon, which had had an arrow shot at its "voonerables" by Sergeant Colon.

The Treacle Mine Road station house also figures prominently as a central location in the historical retrospective Night Watch, described with the poignance of fond memories revisited:

Inside the treacle-roofed stable level, chewing a bit of bad hay, was the horse. Vimes knew it was a horse because it checked out as one: four hooves, tail, head with mane, seedy brown coat. Considered from another angle, it was half a ton of bones held together with horsehair....Then he had another look around the yard. Tilden never did that. He looked at the pigsty in the corner where Knock kept his pig, and then at the chicken run, and the pigeon loft, and the badly made rabbit hutches... The old Watch House! It was all there, just like the day he first arrived. It had been two houses once, and one of them had been the treacle mine office. Everywhere in the city had been something else once. And so the place was a maze of blocked-in doorways and ancient windows and poky rooms. He wandered around like a man in a museum. See the old helmet on a stick for archery practice! See Sergeant Knock’s broken-springed armchair, where he used to sit out on sunny afternoons! And, inside, the smell: floor wax, stale sweat, armor polish, unwashed clothes, ink, a hint of fried fish, and always, here, a taint of treacle.

Having been pitched back in time thirty years in Night Watch, having had to rejoin the Watch at Treacle Mine station under the assumed identity of a dead man, and having encountered his own much younger self, Samuel Vimes' sense of déjà-vu is not helped by his being stationed at what he thought had been a long-draggoned Watch house. However, his intimate knowledge of its weak points, and his practiced skill at making the Ramkin Residence assassin-proof comes in handy, as he is able to identify and booby-trap the obvious means of forced entry against the Cable Street Particulars.

Returning to his present and apprehending Carcer in the Small Gods' Cemetery, with Vetinari a concealed and appreciative onlooker, Vimes accepted the Patrician’s offer to rebuild the Treacle Mine Road Watch House, as good as old:

“Vimes muttered: “A dragon burned it years ago. The Watch House was in ruins. Some dwarfs live in the cellars now…”

“Yes, Commander. But dwarfs… well, dwarfs are so refreshingly open about money. The more money the city offers, the less dwarf there is. The stable’s still there, and the old mining tower. Stout stone walls all around. It could all be put back, Commander. In memory of John Keel, a man who in a few short days changed the lives of many and, perhaps, saved some sanity in a mad world. Why, in a few months you could light the lamp over the door…”