Ranidaphobia (Fear of Frogs): Guist ROC

Darkness. Dankness. The slow dripping of water echoing around the blackness of the bunker. Scattered bottles, graffiti scratched into the walls. Shadow. The hatch above ground wedged open: I have no real idea how securely. I am on my own. The signal on my dimly-lit phone, gone. Blackness. The darkness moves as I turn. Then, piercing the silence - a scraping, metal against stone. Behind me.

My heart lurches. I think: somebody? I think: the hatch closing?

Nope. A bloody frog jumping out of a rusted tin can, scaring the utter hell out of me.

(For actual details on the ROC [Royal Observer Corps] sites, have a look at last week's 'Forewarned Is Forearmed' entries. This one is in the fields outside of Guist, Norfolk).

And the source of my near heart-attack,

Forewarned Is Forearmed: ROC Watton (Up Top)

A lonely former Royal Observer Corps site in the middle of overgrown, muddy fields, outside Watton. An interesting relic from the Cold War days - in a more exposed spot, this would have been trashed, spray-painted, and ransacked, yet items still remain down in the bunker, not terribly interesting in themselves yet thrilling in their context. Civil defence magazines. Rotting toilet rolls. Paperwork. A (now torn) banner from a group calling themselves Thetford CND, who visited in April 1987 - whilst, presumably, the site was still in use.

Following the end of the Second World War and the RAF's increasing reliance upon more sophisticated methods of aerial observation, the main objective of the ROC - overwhelmingly comprised of part-time civilian volunteers - was to provide authorities with data about nuclear explosions and projected radiation fallout patterns. Following the end of the Cold War and the UK government's 'Option for Change' defence spending review, the ROC was disbanded in 1991.

Anyhow. In the quiet fields, abandoned traces of a war that never came.

Deceit: The Surlingham 'Decoy Site' Bunker

During WWII this bunker, in an overgrown patch of field at Surlingham, a small village several miles outside of Norwich, housed the generators for the lighting on the connecting field: a so-called 'decoy' site, the lights intended to fool German bombers into thinking they were in fact flying over any Norwich targets, and bomb there instead.

Inside, the bunker is basically a passageway leading to two small rooms. Nowadays it is well hidden beneath nettles and undergrowth. A blastwall standing in front of the bunker, originaly intended as protection, is ironically now the easiest way to spot it.