The wire picket

The recent winter gales have exposed remnants of the fields of coiled barbed wire that were erected on the sand dunes in 1940, to help keep Nazi Germany at bay. This metal object is a corkscrew picket, used to support the wire, made from an eight foot long iron bar whose bottom end was bent into a spiral coil which was screwed into the ground. It also had loops or "eyes" above the corkscrew spiral to which the rolls of barbed wire were attached.

Millions of these pickets were produced during the first world war, and re-used in the second conflict.

Barbed wire was a fearsome military device and the horror of it featured large in the war poetry of the Great War, for example in Wilfred Owen's Exposure.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?