Et in Arcadia Ego Painting

The war in Ukraine has made me sensitive to the traces another major conflict have left locally. If you walk along the North Downs Way going west from Dorking you will come on this "pillbox", part of the WWII "Stop Line" which was built to protect London from any German advance from the coast had they landed. The slops would have been bare to leave clean lies of fire down to the A25, so the pillbox would have been very visible to any artillery spotters. I wondered about the materials - local Wealden brick facing to the massive internal concrete walls. Other pill boxes I know were left as bare concrete but someone must have decided to integrate this alien structure into the landscape. As you walk through deep wooded hangars you come to a gate onto a meadow. The angular geometry and local Wealden brick makes this pillbox a punctuation point at the edge of the trees. You can sit on the roof and watch for dee on the slope opposite. Now mellowed in to the woods on the North Downs, when built this pillbox would have become a place of death for those who manned it.