Cressage Pillboxes

 

I'm a little late for remembrance day, because I'm disorganised, but I'm continuing Loose-End Season with a war-related blog, having a random mooch over to Cressage to photograph the Pillboxes there. There are two hexagonal Pillboxes designed to defend the nearby bridge over the river Severn. Allegedly there are still a couple of machine gun placements hidden around there too, and I was going to postpone this blog until I could go back to find them.

But this entire area is rather prone to flooding and with the recent rainfall, the fields of Cressage could probably be described as an insufferable slimy mess (to quote my dating profile) so I could be waiting a while. Let's cover the pillboxes anyway.

 

 

With the outbreak of the second world war, there was a very real fear that a German invasion of the UK was imminent, and consequently the Brits introduced a plethora of precautions (Plethautions, anyone? No?)

 

Pillboxes were defensive structures that enabled someone to shoot at an approaching invader from relative safety. I imagine it would take a very skilled marksman to fire a bullet from a distance through a pillbox window and land a killing blow, given that they'd be trying to dodge bullets themselves. 

In regards to the Cressage pillbox, it's important to understand that canals and rivers also provided a natural defensive barrier, and with the River Severn winding mostly southward, it formed a stop line that could halt an enemy's advance, so naturally the powers-that-be wanted to guard it. It had the added importance of being in close proximity to Pitchford, where the Royal Family planned on relocating to if things got hairy.

 

The two pillboxes were built in 1940 and even though they sit alone today, the entire area would have had a lot more going for it. I have seen plans from the time, albeit I've seen photos of photos, so they weren't very clear, but they showed that the area was littered with road blocks, coiled barbed wire barriers and slit trenches. The bridge probably would have been rigged to blow up, too.

 

 

Slipping inside, we can see that there's really not much going on here. The Pillboxes are hexagonal, with the doors at the rear, and the windows at the front. It's all decoratively bleak, but then what were we expecting? I'm quite surprised that there's no graffiti.

 

 

Of course, we all know that in the event of German invasion, exactly how it would have played out is entirely hypothetical. With the invasion likely approaching from the South East, would the Severn in Shropshire been more of a retreating line of defence? Of course, this being the internet there's bound to be someone writing about how they alone know exactly what would have happened and that everyone else is wrong because they saw a video on Youtube about it, but the honest truth is, nobody knows, and speculative history is a playground for the imagination.

 

Hitler had his beady eye on Bridgnorth, wanting to make a base there. Whereas Churchill had Hindlip Hall in Worcestershire as a planned place to retreat to. So the West Midlands absolutely could have become quite a pivotal place. Alternative history is something I'm quite fond of pondering. The Battle of Britain was a monumentally crucial time in British history and it's interesting to think that things could have gone very differently. 

 

 

Here's the second pillbox, completely identical in design, but in a different field.

 

 

And of course, the interior is delightfully samey too, but I had to check it out anyway for the sake of completion.

 

 

This one has fuck loads of snails living in it. 

 

There's a birds nest too! 

But aside from that, I might as well have shown you the same building twice.

 

But the thing is, these pillboxes were obsolete before the war was even over. They'd never been put to the test and as the war chugged on, it became apparent that they never would be. As the invasion of Britain became less and less likely, these things were just left here to be taken back by nature.

I find war ruins particularly eerie given that in maybe thirty years there won't be anyone alive who remembers the world wars at all, but these little structural scars will outlive us. The Cressage Pillboxes are still there for anyone who fancies a quick mooch. They aren't going anywhere, except periodically underwater during flood season.

That's all I've got this time, but soon I'll be posting a Welsh thing on my travel blog, and then I'll be posting a rooftop photoshoot blog, because fuck it, I haven't done one in ages. 

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Thanks for reading!