portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Friday, March 30, 2018






Jonathan Olley, Golf Five Zero watchtower - British Army Watchtower (Borucki Sanger), Crossmaglen, South Armagh, Northern Ireland (1997) - did anyone ever see these? Don't think it was widely understood that such constructions were prevalent in Northern Ireland over here . . . subtle stuff


A military building forming part of the British Army's defensive strategy to control the landscape and people of Northern Ireland and known to the British army as 'Borucki Sanger', after Private James R Borucki, 19, 3 Para, was killed here by a 5lb remote controlled bomb left on a bicycle. 
Operation Rectify, the rebuilding of Crossmaglen security force base beginning in April 1994, involved the largest British air-mobile operation since D-Day. More than a thousand troops descended on the town, 1400 tonnes of building supplies were moved by the Royal Logistics Corps in huge vehicle convoys along secured routes; another 30 tonnes of equipment were moved by air. The work on the base was carried out by 180 Royal Engineers using 39 pieces of heavy plant, including seven cranes which were double crewed to enable the work to continue 24 hours a day. There were five IRA attacks within the 10 weeks it took to rebuild the base; on one occasion a sapper was injured by a mortar bomb but work was underway again within two hours.
Jonathan Olley's wonderful work Here…

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