Welcome to a happy and adventurous New Year from the BTP boys. We’d like to introduce a very special piece of kit that Joe has been learning to use – a drone of course. First of all, the drone enables us to film historic sites from a new aerial perspective, but it also allows us to view places from above that might be difficult or dangerous to reach on foot. We will be using this both in our videos and to take photographs. In fact, some of our recent location explores already have footage from the drone. You can see our Christmas message filmed from the drone below:
What’s coming next on BTP?
Of course we want to use the drone over the next year as much as we can. We’ve got a very interesting feature on a bomb crater on Canvey Island marshes coming up where we take a look at both the crater, from above and on the ground, and at the wreckage of the V2 rocket bomb that crashed there at a local museum. We also just got back from a long trek across Fobbing marshes and around the perimeter of the soon-to-go Coryton oil refinery. Here we checked out a very rare bomb decoy shelter designed to ignite oil across the fields to trick enemy bombing runs in World War Two. Check out our drone footage below of a similarly last-remaining searchlight mirror emplacement in Fambridge. We also were the first ever to find and discover the remains of several buildings from the supposedly long-lost Kynoch explosives factory. We also plan on producing a few collaborative videos where we will get involved with other likeminded explorer-historians and YouTubers.
What were our exploring highlights of the year?
As well as looking forward, we’ve had some excellent adventures this year. If you haven’t seen them all, make sure you take a look! To reflect on just a few of the explores this year, here’s what we’ve looked at.
See more by clicking on each of the place names:
We started the year checking out East Tilbury HAA Battery. We weren’t actually sure if or how we’d be able to look at this interesting site until we arrived. We ended up knocking on the farm owner’s front door and he was kind enough to let us take a look at the site at the back of his farm. Then in Easter, Joe and I spent the day wandering around Cliffe in Kent. Amongst everything from an old explosives factory, shipwrecks, air-raid shelters, and a ruined seafort, we filmed at the ruined launch pad of one of the first ever guided missiles – the Brennan Torpedo. We began our summer with an incredible tour of Hadleigh Iron Age Roundhouse. The site manager was kind enough to let us film whatever we wanted there for the day, and have free reign with some Roman and Celtic weapons and armour. Big kids. We’re really proud of the documentary we filmed there showing off how the working parts of the replica settlement would have worked in Iron Age Britain. We later checked out the site of RAF Hornchurch where we also filmed a really cool documentary. This Christmas we took a look at another heavy anti-aircraft battery just north of Southend; in excellent condition with original writing preserved – see that too in our highlight slider below:
