The Home Front
By Elizabeth Wein
Dragons’ teeth anti-tank blocks on Sandend Beach, Moray Firth, Scotland.
When I moved from the United States to Southern England in 1995, I became vaguely aware of Britain’s “hardened field defenses” from World War II—the hasty fortifications against a threatening Nazi invasion that were frantically put in place between May and September of 1940. There were crumbling concrete anti-aircraft “pillboxes” hiding in the woods and fields all around us, small but heavily fortified defensive positions for observing land and sky, directing searchlights, or firing on invaders. But it wasn’t until five years later, when I moved to Eastern Scotland and grew familiar with the North Sea Coast, that I began to realize the vast extent of the United Kingdom’s World War II coastal defenses. The eastern coast of Great Britain still bristles with the relics of its fight against Germany.
Pill boxes at Bamburgh Beach, England.
Concrete “pillboxes,” so-called because of their mostly hexagonal shapes, litter the landscape here in the United Kingdom. Apparently around a whopping 6,000 pillboxes of several different types still survive—about a fifth of the original number—and they’re nowhere so obvious as on Britain’s beaches. In Bamburgh, in Northumberland, England, where my family and I have vacationed for the past 20 years, a collection of pillboxes stands derelict on the high dunes. Our favorite crowns the horizon, its roof fallen in, still looking out to sea as if it can’t stop watching for approaching enemy aircraft.
Sandbags and dragons’ teeth at Bamburgh Beach, England.
Below it, halfway down the same dune, is another, almost entirely buried in drifting sand. In December 2013, winter storms uncovered a third pillbox in the same location, this one nestling into the foot of the dunes and made entirely of concrete-filled sandbags. Once it was uncovered, high seas quickly destroyed the fragile construction, but some of the sandbags, long since fossilized, still lie strewn about the Whin Sill igneous rocks that emerge along the beach here.
Picnic at Alnmouth. Anti-tank blocks, Embleton Bay, Northumberland Coast, England.
Another wartime feature of Britain’s beaches is anti-tank defenses. Some of these are fields of small, pyramid-shaped lumps of concrete which are fantastically dubbed “dragons’ teeth,” but more common are lines of large concrete blocks or cubes, each often as big as a refrigerator. Intended to make it difficult for invading landing craft to work their way inland, these blocks were placed in rows along the shore by work teams usually digging their entrenchments by hand. About half a dozen anti-tank cubes survive in Bamburgh, gaudily painted as dice and a giant Rubik’s cube, but over the years I’ve discovered that there’s rarely a beach in North East England or Scotland that doesn’t contain a line of these defenses. On the beach at Alnmouth, they make good picnic tables. In the fishing village of Craster to the south, one has been converted as a memorial to local war dead. On the long sands around the Holy Island Causeway to the north, a double row of these cubes stretches away to the horizon, a mute and poignant scar on the landscape which, if you know how to read it, is a reminder of the frantic fear and determination that gripped the British nation as it grimly prepared for war with Germany in 1940.
Pillbox at Dunstanburgh Castle Golf Course, Northumberland, England. George V coin and used carbon rod stub from an arc lamp searchlight found on Broughty Ferry beach, Scotland.
The beach at Tentsmuir Point in Fife, Scotland, at the mouth of the River Tay, is closer to home for me—I live 25 miles upstream in the small city of Perth. Like Bamburgh, Tentsmuir Point contains pillboxes and anti-tank blocks, put in place by Polish forces stationed in Scotland. But at Tentsmuir Point, there are also visible remains of less durable defenses: rotting rows of wooden poles, which were stuck in the sand to prevent enemy glider aircraft from landing on the beach. During the war, these beaches would have also been a snarl of barbed wire and probably full of explosive mines. Tentsmuir Point stretches between two river estuaries, the Eden and the Tay, where they both join the North Sea, and in April of 1940 a minefield was installed at Broughty Ferry on the Tay estuary opposite Tentsmuir.
Broughty Ferry is notable for its 15th century castle, which stands defensive at the entrance to the Tay, Scotland’s longest and Britain’s largest river by volume. During World War II, the Castle Green Battery here was fitted out with modern guns and searchlights to guard the city port and submarine base at Dundee. An afternoon’s actual beachcombing at low tide in Broughty Ferry turned up what appears to be a worn graphite rod from a World War II-era arc lamp searchlight. It’s easy to imagine a young searchlight operator at Castle Green—maybe even a woman—quickly changing the burnt-out rods to keep the lamp working and tossing the used ones into the Tay at high tide for me to find over 80 years later!
Pillboxes and dragons’ teeth on Sandend Beach, Moray Firth, Scotland.
But the amazing thing about the British coastal defenses of World War II is that most of them didn’t see much use. The Battle of Britain, waged in the air in the summer of 1940 between the German Luftwaffe and the British Royal Air Force, prevented Hitler’s military forces from landing on British soil. The dragons’ teeth, mine fields, and barbed wire stayed in place until the end of the war, but by 1943, two years before the Nazis were defeated, most of the pillboxes weren’t even manned anymore.
Like the tiniest fragment of man-made artifacts that we can pick up and take home with us after a day on the beach, these immovable defenses, standing silently right where people like us put them so long ago, have a fascinating story to tell.
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This article appeared in Beachcombing Volume 40 January/February 2024.
