Type 22

A bracing wind wracked the coast this morning, above in grey skys sea birds hovered, glided and swooped amongst the chilling turbulence, as below wind driven waves, rushed, muddied brown with disturbance, creamy crested, towards the sloping shore, then crashed against the tumbled limestone groynes and roared up the pebble beach.   The cliffs here are historically unstable, requiring massive civil engineering works to retain them; the geology is gravel deposits capping a variety of clay horizons, these viscus with fluid lateral movement.  The area is important to both geologists and palaeontologists, with thousands of fossils 30 to million years old, deposited when the area was part of a large tropical lagoon.  A concrete type 22 pillbox rests a jaunty angle after years of slippage down the cliff side; the pillbox is a remnant of the coastal anti invasion defences which once protected the whole bay, a myriad of , bunkers, anti tank / anti personnel scaffold, barbed wire and mines.  Today only a handful of artifacts remain visible between Mudeford and Milford.