Freezing Their **** Off!

Many of Scotland's lighthouses have the shells of concrete buildings near them dating back to WW2. These days they are often home to sheep. This journey stone depicts the listening post at Noss Head, where soldiers listened to the Enigma radio traffic from the German Navy ("Die Kriegs Marine" in German). The ship is a loose interpretation of the German Reserve Battleships (Reserven Schlachtschiffe) from the start of WW2. The sea below the ship spells out LISTENING TO MESSAGES FROM GERMAN SHIPS in Morse Code. The Y station at Noss Head was a direction finding station, so the signal was triangulated with other listening posts to work out where the ships were in the North Sea. There's more about this in this newspaper article.

You can see the WW2 buildings in the black and white photo, at the base of the pylons just outwith the outer walls of the lighthouse compound. This has personal resonance for me because my mother worked at Bletchley Park during the War. I live at Noss Head, and often think of the lads in the listening posts who'd have come a long way to be stationed here, freezing their backsides off, listening to the Kriegs Marine.