This is the latest contribution from one of our younger generation of correspondents, Xavier Marrs, aged 10 years.
My family and I recently walked to the river mouth at Rye Harbour to join a group of volunteers. We were tasked with digging out everything that had collected in the second pillbox at the River Rother mouth. A previous group of volunteers from Sussex Military Research had cleaned out the first pillbox in 2018.
We completed a health and safety checklist. We were warned that people could have defecated (I had to ask my Mum what this meant – it means pooed) in the pillbox, and smashed glass in there. We all looked at our feet… We were wearing sandals!
So we were assigned the task of searching the piles of shingle, sand and soil that others were digging out from the floor of the second world war concrete block (the pillbox). We wore gloves of course, there was so much glass!
Halfway through we started getting darker soil, meaning it was older. In this dirt my Dad found a shilling! The date on it was just visible, 1959.
It had been nearing the end of our time clearing the pillbox and I realised that my knees were dry and dirty, I was sweating and my back ached. It was awesome! The jaunt back to the Discovery Centre was short, and we could think of what we found. I found many pieces of old glass with words on them and a piece of sea glass treasure. My proudest find, though, was a screw fixed into a metal rod, that had come from some sort of electrical device.
At the Discovery Centre, we joined with other members of the Rye Harbour History Group, which meets on the third Saturday of each month.
Image Credits: Barry Yates .
Made me smile