Joss Gap

Kent History Forum photos

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Sound mirrors on the Kent History Forum. There is lots of other good stuff on the site, too.

  • Abbot’s Cliff. Including an aerial photo.
  • Denge. on the last official walk … there was round 300 hundred of us.
  • Fan Hole, near Dover.
  • Hythe.
  • Joss Gap (Kingsgate). Joss bay had two sound mirrors one being a slab, this was cut into the cliff near by the castle keep hotel , now replaced by flats.a slight indentation can still be seen near the top of the cliff. Checking the site where the round mirror was, which was a timber frame rendered. a few years ago the telephone cable blocks were still in place.
  • Warden Point. With a good 1978 photo of it about to go over the cliff.

Books mentioning the northeast and Joss Gap

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Clive Kidd gets in touch to say that sound mirrors get several mentions in The Baby Killers – German Air Raids on Britain in the First World War by Thomas Fegan, (Leo Cooper, 2003 ISBN 0-85052-893-3). pp153-4 Boulby and Redcar, pp176-7 Sunderland and p116 Kilnsea, briefly outlining a system of quadrants for plotting.

EW Sockett in Tyne Tees Defended:1 in World War 1 1914-18 RNAS RFC RAAF (ISBN 0952 8217 02) gives maps and further details of three north-east coast mirrors and WW1 observer lines. Also gets a write up in in T/T Defended II 1914-1941 ISBN 0-952-8217-1-0. He also gives lots of references to other articles he has written on Tyne Tees Defences, mainly in the Yorkshire Antiquites Journal.

Prof R W F Burns gives them a small bit in his IEE Hist of Tech paper on the detection and loction of aircraft and refers to a paper in Kew PRO “report 87 Preliminary report on Joss Gap Station of the acoustical section SEE W S Tucker 22 Sep 1920 AVIA 23/84 PRO Kew. Also has a ref to “Location of a/c by sound Journal of the American physical Society Vol XiV N02 1919 PP166-7.