the Forth Naturalist Historian - Forth Naturalist and Historian ...

110 D. C. Cowley, J. A. Guy, D. M. Henderson
appear to extend far beyond the Wall. The disturbed ground may mark the site
of the depot for handling building materials for the Wall, with what may have
been a site office built on a concrete floor beside the entrance from the road. If
the levelled path originally carried a trolley way from the depot to the Wall, it
must have been carried across Geordie’s Burn on a timber bridge. Strips of
worn vegetation are visible on the 1946 aerial photograph to the south of the
Wall and may mark the lines of paths bringing building materials from the
public road to other parts of the range. The absence of such paths between the
road and Wall adds weight to the suggestion that building materials for the
Wall came from the depot.
The Trench System
To the south-east of the ‘Atlantic Wall’ an extensive network of trenches
connects a concrete blockhouse, two concrete and two timber bunkers and four
gun emplacements (Figure 2). The blockhouse lies midway along the trenchsystem,
and is built above ground of reinforced concrete, with three openings.
It has been fired on extensively and damage is particularly marked around the
openings. In addition holes have been drilled into the concrete to take
explosive charges, which may account for some of the larger craters in the
blockhouse walls.
The trenches extend from the terrace up the flank of Black Hill to the southeast,
and are clearly of two distinct phases, the earlier a simple system dating
from WW I, subsequently modified and extended during WW II. The WW I
trench runs north-east along the terrace from a point adjacent to a turf redoubt
(possibly dating to early in WW II, together with a gun emplacement 60 m to
the east-north-east) on the south-west. The blockhouse and at least three
machine gun emplacements are laid out along it, indicating its reuse during
WW II, presumably as part of the ‘Atlantic Wall’ practice works. The two
concrete bunkers are situated along the back of the terrace and are connected
into the later system. The concrete bunkers are both rectangular but do not
show much sign of damage. Evidently they were not subjected to the same
attention that inflicted so much damage on the blockhouse. The trenches that
connect these bunkers into the system to the north-west, however, are cut by
trenches that zigzag up the slope from the bunkers to circular gun
emplacements on the hillside to the south-east. Another trench zigzags up to a
third emplacement to the south-west. The gun emplacements survive as
ragged hollows measuring between 5 m and 8 m in diameter, and in one case
the iron rods that supported some superstructure are still in place around the
edges of the hollow.
In addition to the gun emplacements, machine gun emplacements are
scattered across the site, but, these are much smaller, measuring only about 2 m
in diameter, in some cases with a concrete lining. The final defensive feature is
an asymmetrical anti-tank ditch, which lies along the north-west front of the
trenches forming the German front line. The scatter of small emplacements
and slit trenches to the south of the trench-system may also have been