Saturday 4 May 2013

Shipwrecks and Hastings

My last couple of days in East Sussex only unearthed one further trig.  This was mainly as I got distracted by work, RICS input and random wanderings in Hastings and Bexhill-on-Sea which didn't go past any trigs.

I tried, vainly, to find the trig on East Hill but ran out of time. If I'd done my homework - it's TP2984 - I would have discovered that a quick glance in the general direction wasn't going to unearth this one. I strongly recommend you click on this link and read the comment posted by senrabyar on 13 Aug 09 - very amusing. Anyway, Hastings was nice when the sun shone and you looked away from the burnt out pier. I stopped by the Shipwreck Museum for a bit.

This looks familiar.
13 05 02 Hastings (6)
Some octants.
13 05 02 Hastings - Shipwrecked Octants
I like the title of this book "Practical Navigation - or an Introduction to that Whole Art".
13 05 02 Hastings - Navigation
The next day I was similarly distracted by lunch out with good company, so I only managed the one - TP5130.
13 05 03 TP5130 - Ninfield Resr
As I collected by daughter from the Space Geodesy Facility, she showed me the Flush Bracket BM from which they had been levelling the day before. My explanations of levelling using optical levels with inverted images made her smile - "no bar coded levelling staff?" she queried. I got very excited when I saw the BM she had levelled from.
13 05 03 BM at SLR station
I don't think I've ever seen a BM that starts with a G. Most flush brackets I see, invariably stuck on trigs, start with an S which date from the levelling campaign of the 1920s onwards.

I quote from the BM website, http://www.bench-marks.org.uk/flush. "The G-series flush brackets first appeared at the start of the Second Geodetic Levelling of Scotland in 1936. Unlike the S-series, numbers below 1000 do not have a leading zero. On most G brackets the letter appears as a prefix, but for a small range from G1000 to G1099 the G appears above the number. The G-series flush brackets are found only on walls, never on triangulation pillars".

I read around this BM website, on their flush brackets page, but now can't work out how the flush brackets on the two trigs TP6562 and TP0011 came about.

Thursday 2 May 2013

Beachy Head

Did some more of the South Downs Way today.  I started at Willingdon Hill and passed the site of a bomber crash enroute to the trig.
13 05 01 TP6948 - Willingdon Hill - USA Bomber Crash Site
13 05 01 TP6948 - Willingdon Hill
I then visited Beachy Head.  Stunning views.
 13 05 01 Beachy Head Views
An easy trig to find.
13 05 01 TP0453 - Beachy Head
And another memorial - to the RAF.  Beach Head was often the last point of England they saw before they flew off on their mission.
13 05 01 Beachy Head - RAF Memorial
And Beachy Head lighthouse.
13 05 01 Beachy Head Lighthouse
And finally I bagged East Hill (between Wilmington and Beachy Head on the South Downs Way).  A trig standing proud on a small mount next to a pond.
13 05 01 TP2972 - East Dean Hill
Very blustery!
13 05 01 TP2972 - East Dean Hill