World War Two Artefacts - John Muir Country Park

Having had a bruising encounter with some wild campers who had thrown left over sausages in the nearby bracken,.(it took me a good 15 minutes  to extract Megan from this bounty) I was wandering through the woods and came across something I had never noticed before. A massiive  letter 'A set in a concrete block'. What was even more intriguing were the hinges set to the side of the letter. The letter was also made of concrete but in. a different colour so there was no way in which the letter itself could be hinged. I decided to explore the internet when I got home to see if I could discover more.

Fortunately there is a blogger, called coast rider who cycles all over East Lothian in search of interesting artefacts and researches their origin. He had come across this letter 'A' in 2019 and decided to find out more during Covid furlough. He had discovered that the were in fact two large letters in the woods, an 'E' and an 'F' which were used in world War II to warn planes when the firing ranges were active. it took a while to find the second letter which had crumbled and broken as some local children had dug out a hideout underneath it fortunately not when they were playing there. These two large letters both had hinges so that they could be hidden under wooden shutters when the firing ranges were not active.. You may well ask why they were in the middle of woods. but in fact the woodland in John Muir Country Park was not planted until the 1950s. and previously the whole area had been relatively flat. it was really nice to discover there is a useful source of local history just sitting there on the net.