Dave Snowdon went on a guided walk to the sound mirrors of Lade Pit, Dungeness on 17 August 2008. There were, apparently, 261 people who attended this walk. The largest group in the 11 years Dr. Scarth has been giving these talks
.
He has some photos of the mirror and the crowds on his website.
The Romney Marsh Countryside Project has announced the dates when the sound mirrors at Denge can be visited in 2009.
Due to the overwhelming popularity of last years Echoes of the Sky tours we are making a few changes this year. We will be holding a new open day on Sunday 19th July. The island will be open from 10am in the morning until 5pm. Dr Richard Scarth, an expert on these structures, will be present to answer any questions. We will have a number of staff stationed at key places to help direct people to the island. There will a member of staff on the bridge asking for a £2 donation per person to cover costs. Parking is available at Lade car park, opposite Taylor Road on Coast Drive (halfway between the Pilot Pub and Romney Sands) (TR 085 208). This will be a non-booking event, you just need to turn up on the day. The walk will be across shingle. For anymore details contact the Romney Marsh Countryside Project on 01797 367934 or email us at mail@rmcp.co.uk.
ECHOES FROM THE SKY WALKS 2009 WALKS DATES ANNOUNCED
As well as the new open day we will be holding two guided walks on Sunday 16th August and Sunday 13th September. They will be lead by ourselves and Dr Richard Scarth, the world’s expert on these structures. The walks start at 2pm and we will be meeting at the Lade car park opposite Taylor Road on Coast Drive (halfway between the Pilot Pub and Romney Sands) (TR 085 208). The walk will last approximately 2.5 hours and is over shingle. It is a non-booking event and donations are appreciated. For more information contact the RMCP on 01797 367934 or email mail@rmcp.co.uk
Source: RMCP
Obviously people should confirm details with RMCP nearer the time. The walks are well worth doing!
Over Christmas I read Air War Over East Yorkshire, an interesting book by Paul Bright about WWII aviation in the East Riding.
It avoids the dryness of a lot of military books, and unusually has a fair amount of data about the Luftwaffe as well as the Allied forces. It discusses the radar stations in the area, including RAF Staxton Wold, possibly the oldest active radar site and with a history as an early warning site stretching back pretty much forever.
Air War Over East Yorkshire
In most accounts of the air war over Britain in summer 1940, the events over East Yorkshire are mentioned only in passing, yet it was there, on 20 August, that the first enemy aircraft fell to the guns of a Polish fighter squadron in the RAF, less than a mile from where these words are being written. It was also where the ‘north-east town’, as Hull was identified in the news bulletins of the day, suffered its prolonged agony under the bombs of the Luftwaffe. Indeed, the very last British civilians to die as a direct result of Luftwaffe bombs in World War II were killed in Hull on 17 March 1945. As the home of much of the RAF’s night-bombing force, East Yorkshire was also frequently the scene of Luftwaffe night intruder raids. This book, based on years of in-depth research into primary sources, personal accounts and experiences, reveals many new facts and gives long-overdue recognition to the events and people who fought, lived and all too often, died, in East Yorkshire during 1939-1945.
AUTHOR NOTES:
Paul Bright, now a retired history teacher, was born in Hunmanby, then a part of East Yorkshire, and as a schoolboy witnessed at firsthand quite a few of the events described in this book. His father was an auxiliary fireman in Hunmanby who participated in the response to many of the air attacks and their aftermath. Other members of his family endured the Blitz in Hull, consequently he is able to write about the period from personal experience as well as from the perspective of the dispassionate historian. He lives in Filey.
Source: Flight Recorder Publications
On February 23 2009 The Prodigy will release an album called Invaders Must Die, which features a track of the same name for which a video was shot at Dungeness. The Denge sound mirrors feature from about 1 min 15 sec in.
‘Invaders Must Die’ is 40 minutes of having your head battered by future nostalgia, serotonin levels twisted by feel-good horrorcore and your synapses snapped by whiplash attitude. It’s the sound of The Prodigy mixing up genres, contorting the past and rewiring the future, ram-raiding through the tranquility of music’s status quo like a blot on the landscape of England’s dreaming.
Source: Invaders Must Die
So now we know. I just hope no morons get it into their heads to try vandalising the mirrors as depicted in the video.
The mirrors have been used by a variety of musicians, including Turin Brakes, Bass Communion and Blank & Jones.
(thanks to Ken Morrow for letting me know about the video)
It’s a bit cold outside — but not cold enough to make a sound mirror out of ice, which is what has been done in Alaska!
The mirror was created as part of the Freeze celebration of Alaska and life in the North
held in Anchorage during January 2009. It was designed by Klaus Mayer, Petra Sattler-Smith and Marisa Favretto, who were inspired to create the ice mirror by the British sound mirrors.
Sound Mirror is inspired by Northern states of change and flux in weather, environment, light and atmosphere. We are interested in emphasizing these juxtapositions, highlighting the states in nature that are significant to states of perception. We are interested in the work acting as a mirror to the elements – light, landscape, passing birds, planes, sounds, while creating a space/form specific to viewer interaction – via size, orientation, composition.
The form is inspired by sound mirrors - a form built around coastal towns in England between 1915 and 1930 to function as an acoustic radar for approaching war planes. The first one was carved out of the chalk cliff on the coast in 1915.
Source: Freeze project
Photographs of the mirror being built from blocks of ice.
The PDF explaining the initial design concept includes a photograph of the Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror near Folkestone.
The completed mirror was praised by Michelle Mitchell in The Freeze Art Show at a Healthy Ten Below at Scribbit:
The most beautiful of the exhibits was a sound mirror that must have been fifteen or sixteen feet high and was built from this gorgeous frosty blue ice that almost looked like it was resin rather than ice. The blocks fit perfectly together to form this giant slab with a concave center so that if you stood on the platform opposite and spoke toward the dish it would reflect your voice back at you.
Source: Scribbit 2009-01-12
There is also a picture of the finished installation on Flickr. Anyone got any more good pictures of it?
Ivor Parrington has sent the Seaham Family History Group a 1976 photograph of the now demolished acoustic mirror at Seaham.
This is the first picture that I have seen of it. As had been reported, the design looks like the World War I sound mirrors at Boulby, Redcar and Sunderland in the northeast, and the one at Selsey in Sussex. The sketch of the reported mirror at Hartlepool looks the same too.
This would date the Seaham mirror to about 1916.
Apparently there is nothing left now, but the location has been identified as being here:
There is some discussion from people who remember it and a painting of it at Seaham Scenes.
(thanks to Raymond Thompson of SFHG)
Not directly related to sound mirrors (V2 rockets were supersonic), but sound mirror fans might be interested in London V2 Rocket Sites…Mapped at Londonist.
The Museum Waalsdorp near Den Haag reflects the history of TNO Defense, Security and Safety at location Waalsdorp (and its predecessors) since 1927
.
At the Waalsdorp site, Dutch scientist JL van Soest investigated the use of listening equipment for aircraft observation by the army, developing his own equipment. The Van Soest apparatus was a great success and has led to industrial production for the Army.
The museum’s website has an interesting short history of Dutch sound location. From the first world war until the 30’s air acoustics played an important role in the air defence. Air vehicles carrying a weapon could not be located from the ground e.g. at night time or under cloudy conditions. As radar was still to be discovered, vision had to be supplemented by hearing using the sound of the engines.
Scott Hawkins has been documenting, cataloging and performing at Sites of Special Sonic Interest across the UK. I classify a performance as any kind of physical interaction resulting in an audible product. Here, looking into the eye of the Sound Mirror at Kilnsea on Spurn Head, the wind (persistent ghostly presence) combined to produce and aerophonic ambient extravaganza.
Roadside Picnics - Disinformation and Sound Mirrors
by Joe Banks & Caroline Grigson
The following text was written in 1997, but did not appear in print until it featured under the title “Antiphony Architectural Supplement” on pages 57-64 of issue 6 of Sound Projector - an experimental noise magazine published in 1999 (Sound Projector is still going strong, but issue 6 is no longer available). The “Antiphony Architectural Supplement” was published to document and explore ideas suggested by the imagery of the Disinformation “Antiphony” double CD and “Antiphony Video Supplement” (later retitled “Blackout”) - both created in 1997, which featured images by photographer Julian Hills and film-maker Barry Hale of air defence Sound Mirrors found at various sites on the UK coast.
….
The solution was provided by an article by W. Harms in Shortwave Magazine, which described a series of massive concrete monoliths which still stand, slowly crumbling into waste-land at a site near Dungeness in Kent. These structures, built in the 1920s and 1930s, formed a primitive experimental early-warning system - several elegant, but extremely austere concave shapes designed to allow the precise triangulation of directional-fixes on the distant sounds of incoming enemy Zeppelins, aircraft and ships.
These shapes rise up out of the Kentish shingle like the strange ceremonial relics of a dead civilisation or unknown tribal culture (and if you consider military R&D as an anthropological entity as well as a purely technical enterprise, then perhaps this interpretation is not as wild as it seems). Appearing alongside a picture of the abandoned Church of St. Giles in the village of Imber (the ghost-town on the tank-ranges of Salisbury Plain) and digital artwork representing the anthropomorphic slang of the RAF, the sound mirrors provided photographer Julian Hills with his Disinformation ‘remix’ for “Antiphony”.
Extensive literature and archive research has so far uncovered a total of seventeen mirrors, sixteen on the Kent and Yorkshire coasts, and one at a site in Malta (which, according to Casemate magazine, is “approached through a slurry of cow muck and dead chickens”). Ten of these can still be visited today, one is buried, two have collapsed, while there are four more mirrors whose status remains, from my point of view, unknown. Architecturally many of the sound mirrors look as though they could have been designed yesterday, and it is on close inspection that they their true state of distress is revealed. It is hard not be impressed by this geometry - the striking contrasts between elegant, concave parabolas and their rough textures, their impressive solidity and substantial physical forms.
