Alderney .......

........ has always made me think of AA Milne's poem -
The King's Breakfast.

I spent a day there today - it is beautiful but has a darker side than A A Milne nursery rhymes. It was evacuated in 1940 and then occupied by the German army who set up slave labour concentration camps which housed 4,000 people from across Europe and Russia. They were not 'death camps' but hundreds perished due to the harsh treatment, poor nutrition and incredibly hard labour building defences. There were four camps and Lager Sylt, which was SS controlled, was particularly brutal.

The beautiful coastline is marked by many old German concrete defences as well as many older and more attractive stone defences built in Napoleonic times. This photograph is taken from inside one of the German gun emplacements at Strongpoint Biberkopf.

After the war the Alderney folk returned to devastated island - and to the sad fact that the Alderney breed of cattle which were made famous in the AA Milne nursery rhyme was extinct. The cattle evacuated to Guernsey had interbred with Guernsey cattle while those left on Alderney had been eaten.