Lost in a landscape: Wretham Circles

Dead cities & forgotten outposts, Lost in a landscape

There’s a lightness about Breckland, A dryness and pallor to the soils that make it feel somehow different from the rest of Norfolk. It’s in the earth, the thin sand with it’s luggage of chalk and flint, the exhausted soldierly lines of Scots pine...

Forgotten outposts: The Bure line at Oxnead

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

You will, as you drive around north and east Norfolk, pass these all over the place. In fact you’ll find them all over the county as you will tank blocks and mortar spigots, even the odd trench line still exists all still protecting us from a long dead, now...

Forgotten Outposts: Stella Plage Atlantikwall

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

A beach in Northern France, Pas De Calais actually, just south of Le Touquet and Etaples. It’s a beautiful beach, so I ignored it and took photos of this bunker. I can’t find anything much out about it. Except it’s a Vf style reinforced personnel...

Forgotten outposts: Brandiston type 22

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

There are hundreds of these scattered across Norfolk, it’s not a modern phenomenon either. Defence starts at the gate to your house, there’s ramparts and forts, dating from the late Neolithic to fairly recent lumps of Cold War concrete dotted about on...

Dead cities: La Coupole

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

This is the Ida railway supply tunnel, Bauvorhaben 21 (Building Project 21), Schotterwerk Nordwest (Northwest Gravel Works) at Wizernes, St Omer. Built by Organisation Todt using “compulsory labour” (about 60% French, 40% non combatant German) the tunnel...

Coasting: Winterton’s war

Coasting, Dead cities & forgotten outposts

Yet more lumps of concrete, I doubt a the vast majority of people even give them a thought apart from trying not to scratch the car. Bit strange though, 13 ton blocks of concrete in a car park, and on the beach in one of those lovely little Norfolk corners. Winterton,...

Dead cities: RAF Attlebridge

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

RAF Attlebridge …the end of the South Eastern runway, Honingham Road, Western Longville. The most accessible publicly visible bit of the airfield left. The first station built in Norfolk for WW2 use. Originally RAF flying Blenheims and Bostons, it passed to...

Dead cities: Langham Dome

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

A sort of anti-axis forces death star type thing. It looks a bit like one of those chocolate bombs or a steamed pudding, but about 18 feet high, made of reinforced concrete and painted black. Nestling on the edge of an abandoned airfield about 4 miles from the coast,...

Dead cities: Thorpe Abbotts

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

In February I was fortunate enough to get invited by Waveney Valley Community Archaeology Group with the permission of Lord Mann on a reconnaissance mission for a project they are doing on studying standing buildings on the site of Thorpe Abbotts airfield; A Second...

Coasting: Guns of Mundesley

Coasting, Dead cities & forgotten outposts

An odd little place is Munsley, somewhere inbetween Victoria and now you can sense a fading  into much more of a backwater than was probably intended by the holiday destination builders. A pretty Victorian resort perched on high soft glacial sand cliffs, protected...

Dead cities: RAF Swannington

Dead cities & forgotten outposts

RAF Swannington, known locally as RAF Haveringland, either way it’s a little Gem, I spent the best part of a blisteringly hot afternoon messing around on the edges of an all but invisible Second World War airfield. It’s just there, lost in the landscape,...

Lost in a Landscape: RAF Happisburgh

Dead cities & forgotten outposts, Lost in a landscape

Everyone I mean *everyone* in North Norfolk, and the Eastern bit of North Norfolk, or East Norfolk as I like to call it when I’m a bit y’know, not from London or the home counties, knows Happisburgh. It’s the most interesting bit of Norfolk Coast by...