It's a late one, but was just reminded of it.
Circa 1990 aged around 15/16 I used to visit my mate at his house in a little hamlet outside of Nantwich called Sound.

Sound had a Heath which as Sound was in the middle of nowhere (i.e. 5 miles from the nearest shop) it was the place we would frequent when we got bored of trashing his own garden. It was a lovely place very quiet due to its location and had very few visitors, we used to go down there with his school friends and have a laugh as teens do, parties, girls, booze and frolics in the long dry grass.

One of these summer days we set to making a small bonfire which as you may have guessed got ever so slightly out of hand, we tried our hardest to put it out but to no avail, it spread like, well, fire!

1 acre of natural beauty was alight within minutes, well we did what any young lads would do, we ran like fuck… at arriving at his house some 5 minutes full tilt running, we hid in his garden, we stank of smoke, you could see the smoke rising into the clouds, someone must have called 999 then we heard the fire engines FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, we need a plan, light a bonfire in his garden was the only thing we could come up with, they normally had one lit so it was nothing out of the ordinary.

The engines (all 3 of them) came flying down the road past his house closely followed by the police and an ambulance, we were going to get in some shit for this we thought… time passed, the fire was extinguished and then came the knock at the door, ‘yes officer, how can I help?’ his mum says when opening the door. Blah, blah, fire on the common, have you seen anything suspicious, what a star his mum is, ‘nothing she says’ knowing damn well that it will have had something to do with us. Ok says the copper and gets back into his car.

We were hiding in the hay barn at this point looking through the cracks on the boards waiting for the fateful call of ‘x and x’ get here now!!! Down we get from our lofty hiding place, we got bollocked and I mean bollocked, he was grounded for weeks my parents were called and told to come and pick me up. But still neither sets of parents grassed us up, thank you all.

I’m so sorry to all the creatures that must have been scarred to death trying to outrun a fire.
And sorry to all the emergency services that risked their lives.

If you go back there now there is still charred bits of it some 20yrs later

(Posted under a different account so as to attempt to keep anonymity)
(Mr M@ Probably not that difficult!, Thu 2 Sep 2010, 8:53, Reply)