Relics of a Darker Age

A fine Sunday afternoon and everyone is out enjoying the sunshine. A hanglider hugs the cliffs whilst dog walkers throw sticks into the surf on the beach below. Jetskis and windsurfers skim the waves and down at the Smugglers Inn people soak up the sunshine and sip their beer.

Today the bay is a wide playground, but here and there we come across reminders of a darker time – a time when the threat of invasion was very real, and the coastline was fortified. A time of war.
As you walk along the coastpath, you could easily pass these by. The brickwork still stands, overgrown with brambles and nettles; machine gun emplacements looking out across the bay, reminding us that things here were once very different.

But even today not everything is as it seems, for there a four large ships tied up in the shelter of the bay. There’s a storm out there somewhere. But me? I’m eating ice-cream and playing with my children in the sand.