Newspaper clipping taken from page 7 of the South Wales Echo titled 'Volunteers clean old gun battery', describing the work of an International Voluntary Service (IVS) team on Steep Holm Island, Cardiff, 4 August 1975

Description

An article describing the work of an International Voluntary Service (IVS) team on Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel.

A history of IVS can be found on their website: ivsgb.org/history/.

"Purchased in 1976 as a living memorial to Kenneth Allsop, a broadcaster, author, and passionate campaigner for conservation causes, who died in 1973, Steep Holm is a nature reserve, bird sanctuary, and Site of Special Scientific Interest due to its rare plants, including the May flowering wild Mediterranean Peony." Source: www.steepholm.org.uk/, accessed 9/5/17.

Transcription:

Volunteers clean old gun battery

A TEAM OF nine International Voluntary Service workers are restoring an unusual military monument on the island of Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel this week.

The island is being acquired as a nature reserve by the Kenneth Allsop Memorial Trust, and the site of Split Rock Battery has been scheduled as an Ancient Monument by the Department of the Environment.

Built in 1867 at the top of a 200ft. cliff overlooking the Channel towards Exmoor and Lundy, the battery is intact with underground magazine chambers, barbets and two seven-ton rifled cannon - among the last muzzle-loaders is to be made at Woolwich.

Most members of the IVS team come from Germany and France, and they are clearing the battery of elder trees and several tons of bricks and concrete from ruined World War II buildings.

“One relic of the last war is being left,” said Mr. Rodney Legg, secretary of the Allsop Trust. “It is a concrete pad with a circle of iron rods on which an anti-aircraft gun was mounted in 1942. The rest of the 1940 additions are an eyesore.”

The Allsop Trust set out to create a wildlife sanctuary in memory of conservationist and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop who died in 1973.

Now the trust have found themselves guardians of the military monument, which is regarded officially as the best preserved example of the type.

From Microform, Local Studies, Cardiff Library.
Image created by The British Library Board.
Copyright: Media Wales.