We're in the English countryside, in a shed.

Outside, it's daytime and the sun is shining, but here inside the shed, it's pitch black.

At first the only things visible are flickers of faint yellow light.

A small group of people are holding Victorian candlesticks on long spikes,

moving methodically through the shed. But then the light of these candles reveals a scene that seems almost otherworldly.

Blanketing the floor is a miniature forest of slender crimson red stocks,

growing up to about waste height, on top of each one, like a fancy

feathered hat, is a single pale green frilly leaf. This strange plant is

rhubar, and if you come at the right time of the year, you won't just see the rhubarb growing. You'll hear it.

You hear them pop. A bit like a peepod popping up and it's not a loud noise at all.

But when it's in theory darkness, you just wonder when you're not expecting it what's that popping nuts.

I'm Eric Grunhouser and this is Atlas Obscura.

A celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today we're taking you to a part of England where farmers take years to coax their rhubarb plants

into a world-renowned delicacy.

They use the same tools and methods that have been used for over a century.

We're taking you to the rhubarb triangle.

After this. People start to whisper when they go in there. It's quite funny really because it's just as though I think we're going to wake the room bar book that it's asleep in the darkness. Janet Oldroyd's family has been growing rhubarb for generations. So she's brought many, many curious visitors on tours through her farms warm, dark candle-lit rhubarb sheds.

Some say it's very church-like atmosphere,

whether it's because it's warm in there

on a cold winter's day.

And as I said, there on a cold winter's day.

...