Day 5: April 9th 2014: Exploring the landscape

Today I decided to explore the landscape around Lager Wick while Peter did the resistivity survey of the camp. I visited the Maltieres quarry, where some of the men from the camp worked. I also went to Fort William and Fort Henry, two 18th century forts nearby which have additions dating to the German occupation. I also went up to the Royal Jersey Golf Club and managed to persuade the kind people there to let me into their back garden. There I found the air raid shelter of Lager Franco, the camp where the men of Lager Wick were housed before being moved to Wick in 1942. The shelter was fairly large. It is estimated that Lager Wick held 200 men, and I think they could just about have been squeezed into the space, without much thought given to their comfort. Apparently, Lager Franco was the only labour camp with its own shelter in Jersey. Today, the golf club use the shelter as their wine cellar, so today’s photo is of me inspecting a bottle of plonk in there! I also got permission for the team to return to Fort Henry (on golf club land) tomorrow for an excavation field trip, which will include a trip to the bunkers on the beach below. 

Tomorrow we will also be joined by TV cameras from Channel TV, who want to see what we’ve been getting up to. I think that the entrance posts of the camp make an evocative image, but hopefully we will have even more to show people in due course. We were visited by the Jersey Evening Post today, so I hope to be able to post their article soon.

This evening, Professor Marek Jasinski from NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, arrived in Jersey. I’ve invited him to join the team because he has experience of researching and excavating WWII Organisation Todt camps in Norway and he’s a pal of mine. I’m really looking forward to showing him the site tomorrow. Welcome to the dig, Marek!

Day 1 of the archaeological project (5 April 2014)

Today the project started at Lager Wick. Our aims for the day were to carry out a walk-over survey of the entire area of the camp, and we were accompanied by Piers Sangan of Sangan Island Conservation, who guided us around the site. Piers has recently been involved in clearing the part of the site that we will survey and excavate, so he accompanied us around the area beyond this, as requested by the landowners, the Chefs Tenants of Grouville.

The area was so very densely covered in trees, bushes, undergrowth and overgrowth that it literally was not possible to even walk in the vast majority of the camp beyond the survey area. We could only visit a few isolated pockets, and even this left us covered in scratches, stinging nettle stings and getting sucked down into the boggy areas of the land. Despite this, Piers led us to the one surviving structure of the site, which Ginns (2006, 77) cites as the latrines. The structure has become choked with undergrowth since he photographed it in the early 1990s and was almost unrecognisable.

We also found what seemed to be something possibly connected with the camp’s electricity supply – an electricity post – but whether it dates to the camp or is part of the general parish rubbish that was dumped here over the years, we cannot yet be sure (I welcome thoughts from anyone who recognises them).

We also took the opportunity today to probe the surface of the ground to see if any hut platforms could be detected. Aerial photos do not show hut platforms in the area we investigated, and we did not obtain any positive suggestion on the ground to suggest that they might exist / survive.

I certainly wish that it was possible to see more traces of the camp, and to survey a wider area, but the sheer density of foliage makes this prohibitive.