The long stretch of beach that runs from the car park north to East Head tip is normally fairly featureless apart, that is, for the quite dramatic sand dunes on your right as you walk north.
However in 2019 a concrete beam appeared out of the sand and at least one person who has known the East Head Spit for more than seventy years had never seen the beam before. The first one can be seen just behind the couple strolling along the beach.
Pictures
Over the next few weeks a second beam appeared. It is more or less parallel to the first and clearly one of a carefully located pair.
Location
There are several ways we have tried to pin point where the beams are and these are shown below:
Dead reckoning.
Using a starting point of the end of the line of posts as soon as you enter the beach, walk for 203 meters along the beach parallel to the high tide line. That should put you between the two beams.
Lat/Long
50 46′ 29.697″N, 000 51′ 41.263″W. This needs verifying.
Triangulation
West Pole = 210. Hayling Island Sailing Club top deck = 280. Warship profile above Potsmouth = 300. These are not ideal targets but they provided the best spread available of fixed items.
Size
In terms of size they are each 4.85 metres long and 0.33 metres wide. The depth has not been measured.
What are they?
During the second World War, what is now West Wittering car park, was used as a decoy for RAF Thorney Island. They even erected a “control tower” which was most probably constructed using scaffolding as its frame and so the beams could well have been the footings for the structure.
One local resident remembers visiting the beach in the 1950’s and having evening driving lessons (the car park was never shut then) in the early 1960’s and clearly remembers a structure that would fit.
Research has unearthed an aerial shot taken in the 1946 where a tall structure is clearly visible in the same location as these beams. Note how the spit and all the surrounding area, including Snow Hill Creek has changed.
