12 views of Above Bar Southampton. A stroll around the city this afternoon.
City Views.
Historic Places
Lymington Quay.
Lymington Quay on the Beaulieu River on the edge of the New Forest hints at its fishing past but now meets up with the modern leisure sailing world.
Art of War.
A visit to Fort Nelson and a closer look at some of the fine art on canons at the Royal Armourers Museum this morning. Guns made to kill but are a work of art!
Little trains.
With the school 1/2 term holidays underway the little narrow gauge railway around Lakeside at Easleigh is running daily this week. Pictures were taken at slow speeds to give some movement!
Rupert.
WW2 British D-Day Deception Decoy Paratrooper Dummy, these dummies were produced for the decoy operation, known as Operation Titanic part of the larger operation for the deception of the D-Day landings. The Allied forces dropped hundreds of these sacking dummies across parts of France on the 5th / 6th of June 1944 to deceive the Germans to move their forces away from the actual invasion force on the Normandy drop zones. Although these dummies are much smaller than a person when at a height they did fool the German forces, they were packed with an incendiary which would ignite them when they hit the ground, in the hope of destroying the evidence of the decoy from the Germans. These dummies were given the nickname ‘Rupert’s’.
Beer Caves.
Beer Quarry Caves are a man-made underground complex located a mile west of the village of Beer, Devon. The tunnels resulted from 2,000 years of quarrying Beer stone, which was particularly favoured for the cathedral and church features such as door and window surrounds because of its colour and workability for carving. Stone from the quarry was used to construct several of Southern England’s ancient cathedrals and other important buildings, as well as many town and village churches and some buildings in the United States. Extraction was particularly intense during the Middle Ages the quarry closed in the 1920s.
Today you can visit the caves on an hour-long underground tour through the vast man-made complex of underground caverns There are large halls with vaulted roofs and pillars of Beer Stone which have been likened to a vast underground cathedral.
D-Day Museum.
A visit to Southsea near Portsmouth allowed me to visit the D-Day museum. Within the museum is The Overlord Embroidery, which was commissioned in 1968 by Lord Dulverton. It is 83 metres long and made up of 34 panels, all hand-stitched.
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Operation Overlord was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful liberation of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II. The operation started with the run-up to D-Day on 6 June 1944 with the landings (Operation Neptune). A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June, and more than two million Allied troops were in France by the end of August.
Royal Navy War Memorial Southsea Parade.
End of the Peir.
End of the pier and the end of the season Southsea Hampshire. The people have gone home the lights are turned off and the paint has faded.
Merdon Castle.
This post was 50 years in the making! When I was a teenager I visited as many castles as I could from the largest to the smallest. Merdon Castle is a large castle on private land and not normally open to the public, around 1974 the closest I could see this site was standing on a box looking over a boundary fence. Last week I saw the Castle was going to be open on 2 special Heritage days. Merdon Castle is located just outside Winchester near the village of Hursley.
About the castle taken from Heritage Open Days web page.
“Recently removed from Historic England’s “At Risk” Register, following restoration work by Home Farm Estate and Historic England, this is a rare opportunity to visit the remains of one of the castles built by Henri de Blois, Bishop of Winchester and brother of King Stephen during the tumultuous years of “The Anarchy” that ended the Norman era in England.
Although the ramparts date back to pre-history the castle was built around 1138 but lasted only until the accession of Henry II. For the next four hundred years it was the manorial court for the Manor of Merdon and a palace from which the bishop could enjoy hunting in Hursley Park. Largely forgotten for the next five hundred years, as the focus shifted to Hursley Park House, it has remained little changed since the Eighteenth century, covered in ivy and hidden within the park. Now, cleared and the walls stabilized, it is possible to imagine what the castle would have looked like and wonder what the soldiers who visited it from the Army Camps in and around it in WWI and WWII would have thought.”
Beer you do not drink.
On the South Devon coast is a small smugglers’ cove with a shingle beach nestled beneath Beer head. A small beach-launched fishing fleet operates and sells fresh fish in a small shop just above the high water mark.
Continued Reflections from my World. 