This probably rates as my find of the year. While I was over at Burntisland the other week, I saw these on the beach.
Turns out they're 1940 anti-landing obstacles! Each stake is around three foot high, and surrounded by four staked-down spars, each of which is three foot long. The central stakes were originally much higher, but at some point they have been cut down to minimise the navigation hazard to fishing vessels/pleasure craft etc.
They stretch for a good few hundred yards, and seem to make a
\ | / pattern, but whether this is intentional or just the effect of 65 years of tidal action, I don't know.
This is the view north-east to Kinghorn:
This is the view south across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh...
And this is the view south-west back towards Burntisland....
The main railway line runs along the shore here on an elevated stone embankment, so perhaps these were all that was thought necessary to protect the beach. There
is a pedestrian underpass straight off the beach onto the main road, but this would have been blocked.
At the Burntisland end of the beach is an 18th century Limekiln, immediately to the rear of that pillbox I pictured earlier. There's no surviving physical evidence to prove it, but all the structure would have needed to turn it into a strongpoint would have been the sandbagging of the various entrances.
[ 27. September 2005, 05:06 PM: Message edited by: The_Historian ]