DERELICT SUNDAY

After seeing the New Year in with friends, we slept well and decided as it was sunny and there was no church service, we would go out and look for some dereliction - I daresay there is plenty in the town centres of most towns today, but we wanted to go out into the countryside.  Mr. HCB decided that we hadn’t been to Devizes for a while, so that was where we headed.  We turned off at Bishops Cannings and then just meandered, but before long it started raining.

We stopped several times to watch buzzards and sparrow hawks but it was rather unpleasant in the pouring rain, so we decided to make our way back.  We passed this derelict pillbox at Horton and while Mr. HCB turned the car round, I got out and took a few shots.  Several cars went past and I got rather wet from the spray, but a very kind man in a Land Rover stopped to check that we were all right.  I asked him if this was a pillbox and he confirmed that it was left from the last war.

I looked up details online when I got home and apparently, it is a Type FW3/22 Infantry Pillbox - and is one of several defensive structures on the GHQ (General Headquarters) Line along the Kennet & Avon Canal in Wiltshire, which used the east to west running canal as part of a key static defensive line if there had been an invasion of the South Coast of England.  You can read more here if you are interested.

I didn’t go inside, but I have no doubt we will go back at some stage and have a better look round, and hopefully when the weather is better.

We are now back home - glad to have a warm home and good food to start our New Year.

“Write it on your heart that
      every day is the best day
          of the year.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson