I have just spent a couple of nights living in the beautiful, but spartan, Archirondel Tower, a Martello tower on the east coast of Jersey in the Channel Islands. Built in 1792, it was extensively ‘refurbished’ by the occupying Nazis in 1941. A swastika and date are still very easy to find on the inside of the tower.
My father-in-law and I took great pleasure in resting on the ramparts and identifying the navigational marks out at sea, using a pair of binoculars. ‘There, I have the Giffard Port marker!’ One of us would cry as the waves pounded at the rocks below and their mist mixed with the smoke rising up from the freshly caught mackerel on the BBQ at our feet. The red and white stripes of the tower are themselves an aid to navigation, easily identified by shipping near and far.
For the two days we…
A tiny piece about ‘Les Ecrehous’ islands, that I had written for the Guardian ages ago, featured in it 
While sorting my photos from our summer holiday I came across this one on the way to Les Ecrehous islands. It shows a critical moment in the use of a transit line to navigate the potentially hazardous approach. Transit navigation works by the very simple (and totally natural) principle that if you can see any two objects lined up then you must be somewhere on an extension of that line. The approach to Les Ecrehous, northeast of Jersey in the Channel Islands is so strewn with rocks that even GPS is of limited use, since by the time it tells you you’re off course you could well be breathing brine.