Ecclesbourne Cliffs

The purchaser lamented in her note to the person she was sending it to that "Ted is rather disappointed that the beach is all stones because we took the trouble to bring his bucket and spade"!

A little further west from here there is a track leading down to a small cove and beach. When we were kids this was cordoned off with barbed wire and signs showing a mine field and to keep out. We used to go to the summit above this cove and roll or throw the biggest rocks we could manage over to set one off. Never did though and thought the sign was out of date and started to venture further and further down the track. Then all of a sudden in about 1957 or so a load of sappers were billeted in the houses in Victoria Ave and started clearing said mines, they used to pile them up and explode them on Saturday mornings. Great fun though.

Just thought of something else. We were always finding boxes and clips of 303 bullets all over the place, I was told that there was a base nearby where one of the special units of home guard were secreted away. These bullets were trading tokens at school for all sorts of contraband and I will not embarrass the lad in our class who lost a finger trying to fire one in a vice. As I said good fun though.

My dad told me there was a firing range here. We used to find bullets also....you can still find shreds of them in places if you look hard enough