Big Falkland's Adventure: Mount Harriet

I'd been wanting to have a look at Mount Harriet for a while. The previous week we had done a tour of Two Sister with FIDF, but I had forgotten to pick up my camera......

I made sure I had it for this one!

As always, the battlefields are littered with the debris of war, although there seems to be more on this one, probably not had as many souvenir hunters I guess!

There was the usual collection of boots and plimsolls, the reason for this is that during the night time, the Argentines would change from boots into plimsolls. All of the attacks were night attacks, hence the left behind footwear.

In the picture above you can see the remains of a plimsoll, and the black canister is from a respirator

Empty cases still litter the ground, they are brass so do not corrode......

....unlike the magazine above. We did check and it was empty!

These two photos are of the same position, and contains some of the items shown in the photos above, along with blankets and the remains of a LAW.

Memorial to fallen Royal Marine Cpl Laurence Watts

We've got quite good at spotting things as we walk around the sites, and tucked in a crack in some rocks we found this NBC (nuclear biological chemical) warfare boot. A lot of the British troops wore these over their main boots as the DMS boot let lots of water in causing trench foot.

This debris was around a 120mm mortar position. It was directly below the postion shown earlier with the LAW, I wonder if it was fired at this postion?

The four photos above were at another 120mm mortar position. The long pole is used to extract mortar shells which have misfired. The only way to remove them is to insert the pole, and the disc on the end has some friction pads which grabbed the tip of the round allowing it to withdrawn. The kettle had a perfect bullet hole in the base!

These two pictures show mountings for 50 Calibre heavy machine guns which were placed on Mount Harriet. The view in the lower picture covers the route that the Royal Marines came in along before commencing the attack. Had the Argentinians seen them, they would wrecked the assault and inflicted some very heavy casualties.