Poles apart with rare anti-Nazi defences on Reiss croft
It may look like a mouldy old telegraph pole but a rare artefact in the Reiss area harks back to a time when Britain was geared up for a full-scale invasion by enemy forces.
While she was helping at her brother's croft called Plover Inn, Reiss, Bib Harrold took a picture of the approximately 20ft high pole that sits alongside a fence close to the Old Schoolhouse in Killimster.
"There's a bit of history from war time," said Bib. "They were used to stop planes landing during the war. There used to be lots of them scattered about but we still have one standing. We were shifting sheep today so I took a photo of it."
Bib said there was another one at her brother Charlie Harrold's croft but it rotted and fell over quite a number of years ago making this a very unique example of a fully intact anti-glider pole.
Along the entire east coast of Scotland efforts were made to prevent German landings during the Second World War. At Reiss beach and the surrounding area, measures were taken to prevent gliders and aircraft from landing. The Germans had used gliders to land troops beside Dutch positions on the large beaches of Holland. Efforts were designed to prevent that happening at Reiss beach and other possible points of invasion – the easiest way was to destroy the gliders as they attempted to land was by breaking them up with high wooden poles.
The basic design was a run of vertical wooden poles set into concrete or even pipes which were placed in the sand. Wire was stretched between the poles which would became entangled around the glider.
Stumps of these wooden poles along with their concrete foundations can still be seen on Reiss and Dunnet beaches but all have been cut down to a very short height postwar. The defensive structure at Plover Inn croft appears to be a very rare example of a completely intact anti-glider pole.
Bib has previously spoken to the paper about another rare World War Two find – fragments of the first Nazi bomb to fall on British mainland at an area of moorland called Acharole near Watten
Angus Sinclair, who owned the land where the bomb fell and was a relative of Bib, had some of the prize pieces of it in a shed. When Angus passed away eight years ago, Bib inherited the fragments of bomb casing which are deceptively heavy – the largest weighing almost a stone and a half.
Related article:
First WW2 bomb on UK mainland landed near Watten
