The Ramson Cliff boulder has had me hooked for over a year now (the mystery, the 2025 visit, the second thin section and last month's post), and the full story is in the paper in Quaternary Newsletter 167. One question kept nagging at me. The stone was found in 1969 at SS 4356 4070, out in the field on Baggy Point, and moved to the field edge in the early 1970s. Was it already sitting there in 1940, and would a wartime aerial photograph show it?
So I flew in to have a look, using a Luftwaffe reconnaissance photograph taken over North Devon in the summer of 1940.
How I made it
The photographs come from Luftwaffe sortie GX 10006 SD, flown on 31 August 1940. Each frame has the camera's clock photographed in the corner. The clock in the neighbouring frame reads 12:45 BST, which puts the frame over the find spot at about the same moment. I lined the frames up against the modern map, tightening the fit around Baggy Point using the field banks that show on the Environment Agency LiDAR. Then I stitched them into a mosaic and flew a virtual camera in from the south over Croyde, descending and tilting down until it looks straight down on the target.
On the approach: the 1940 fields of Baggy Point, built from sortie GX 10006 SD.
The limit is resolution. The National Archives scans of these frames come out at about 1.5 m per pixel on the ground. The boulder is 105 x 55 x 38 cm and weighs 378 kg, so it is smaller than a single pixel. I never expected to see the stone itself. What I was looking for were the things a big stone in a field does to the land around it: livestock tracks converging on it, a trampled or poached patch, ploughing that bends round it, or an unploughed island left where the plough couldn't go.
Over the target: the circle marks the 1969 find spot, SS 4356 4070, on the 31 August 1940 photograph.
What it shows
Honestly, nothing. In 1940 the find spot lies in a strip of grass inside the cliff-top boundary. With the contrast pushed up there are no tracks running to it, no worn patch, and no sign of cultivation avoiding it. The other photographs I have looked at, GX 11967 (23 March 1941) and RAF 106G/LA/132 (14 February 1945), are no clearer. That doesn't prove the stone wasn't there: a stone smaller than a pixel in a grass field could easily leave no trace. But the wartime air photos can't settle it either way.
The film ends on the LiDAR, which picks out the cliff-top field edge where the stone sits today.
Mae LiDAR Lens Ynys Môn yn dangos Môn gyfan mewn LiDAR 1 m, mewn gwyliwr cyflym am ddim sy'n gweithio cystal ar ffôn mewn cae ag ar gyfrifiadur. Mae LiDAR Llywodraeth Cymru yn cwmpasu'r ynys gyfan bron, ac mae pob teil yn cael ei gadw gyda'r lens, felly mae'n llwytho'n gyflym ble bynnag yr ydych. Mae Bryn Celli Ddu i'w weld yn ei dirwedd, Barclodiad y Gawres ar ei bentir, strydoedd a muriau Caergybi yn dod i'r golwg, a'r cytiau crwn a'r hen gaeau ar Fynydd Tŵr yn neidio allan o lethrau'r mynydd. Mae'r enwau lleoedd yn Gymraeg yn gyntaf, gyda'r Saesneg mewn cromfachau, ac mae pob un o 147 heneb gofrestredig Cadw ar yr ynys wedi'u marcio, gyda dolen i'w hadroddiad. Does dim angen mewngofnodi, dim cyfrif a dim hysbysebion.
Sut mae'n gweithio
Symudwch a chwyddwch ar draws yr ynys, neu defnyddiwch y blwch Go to i neidio i le neu gyfeirnod grid. Ar ffôn, mae Use my location yn eich rhoi ar y map yn y fan lle rydych yn sefyll, sy'n ddefnyddiol yn y maes. Daw'r 146 enw lle o restr Comisiynydd y Gymraeg o enwau lleoedd safonol, er enghraifft Biwmares (Beaumaris) a Llangefni. Cliciwch ar heneb gofrestredig i agor ei hadroddiad gan Cadw, a dilynwch y dolenni i Archwilio a Coflein am y cofnod amgylchedd hanesyddol ehangach.
Defnydd teg
Nid oes unrhyw ddata o'r cofnod amgylchedd hanesyddol wedi'i gopïo i'r lens; mae'n cysylltu ag Archwilio a Coflein, sy'n parhau i fod y lle i chwilio. Parchwch dirfeddianwyr, a chofiwch fod henebion cofrestredig wedi'u diogelu gan y gyfraith. Nid yw gweld rhywbeth yn y LiDAR yn rhoi caniatâd i fynd i edrych arno.
Cydnabyddiaeth
LiDAR: DTM 1 m Llywodraeth Cymru (MapDataCymru), Trwydded Llywodraeth Agored f3
Enwau lleoedd: Comisiynydd y Gymraeg, rhestr o enwau lleoedd safonol Cymru
Henebion cofrestredig: Cadw, Trwydded Llywodraeth Agored
Am Gymru a Lloegr gyfan, a'r lensys eraill, ewch i lidarlens.sarsen.org. Mae'r cod ar GitHub. Croeso i chi adael sylwadau, ac unrhyw beth diddorol a welwch, isod.
LiDAR Lens Ynys Môn puts the whole of Anglesey in 1 m LiDAR into a fast, free viewer that works as well on a phone in a field as on a desktop. The Welsh Government's LiDAR covers essentially the entire island, and every tile is stored with the lens, so it loads quickly wherever you are. Bryn Celli Ddu sits in its landscape, Barclodiad y Gawres crowns its headland, the walls and streets of Caergybi (Holyhead) show through, and the old hut circles and fields on Mynydd Tŵr (Holyhead Mountain) leap out of the hillside. Place names are Welsh first, with English in brackets, and all 147 of Cadw's scheduled monuments on the island are marked and linked. There is no login, no account and no adverts.
How it works
Pan and zoom across the island, or use Go to box to jump to a place or grid reference. On a phone, Use my location puts you on the map where you are standing, which is handy in the field. The 146 place names come from the Welsh Language Commissioner's list of standardised Welsh place names, such as Biwmares (Beaumaris) and Llangefni. Click a scheduled monument to open its Cadw report, and follow the links out to Archwilio and Coflein for the wider historic environment record.
Fair use
No historic environment record data is copied into the lens; it links to Archwilio and Coflein, which remain the places to look things up. Please respect landowners, and remember that scheduled monuments are protected by law. Seeing something in the LiDAR is not permission to go and look.
Credits
LiDAR: Welsh Government 1 m DTM (DataMapWales), Open Government Licence v3
Place names: Welsh Language Commissioner, list of standardised Welsh place names
Scheduled monuments: Cadw, Open Government Licence
For England and Wales as a whole, and the other lenses, see lidarlens.sarsen.org. The code is on GitHub. Comments and anything interesting you spot are welcome below.
This post is the companion to the short film Twice into the guns. The film follows the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry through the two attacks it made at the Second Battle of El Alamein, over the ground as it lies today. The sources, figures and maps behind it follow.
The regiment
The Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry was raised in 1794 and kept its horses until 1941. Converted to tanks, it went to Egypt in May 1942 with the 3rd Hussars and the Warwickshire Yeomanry as 9th Armoured Brigade (Brigadier John Currie), placed under the 2nd New Zealand Division (Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg) for the coming offensive. For Operation Lightfoot the regiment, under Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Sykes, held 10 Shermans, 14 Grants and 13 Crusaders; six of the Crusaders were detached to go forward with the 21st and 22nd New Zealand Battalions (US Army 2006, App. J, from the regimental war diary).
The ground
The Alamein line from the air: the Axis minefields as mapped at daybreak on 24 October 1942, Miteiriya and Ruweisat Ridges, the Qattara Depression on the horizon.
Copernicus GLO-30, heights × 8.
The northern Alamein position is close to flat. Most of it lies between 15 and 45 m above sea level, and Miteiriya Ridge, the New Zealand objective on the first night, stands only 5 to 6 m above the desert around it (US Army 2006, App. H). The terrain views in the film are rendered from the Copernicus GLO-30 elevation model, with heights exaggerated eight times so that the ridges show at all. The model records the ground surface today, so modern roads, pipelines and coastal building appear in it.
Both armies lay behind deep belts of mines and wire. The Axis belts shown in the film are those drawn on the New Zealand official history's map of 30 Corps at daybreak on 24 October (Walker 1967), transferred to the modern terrain by matching the map's trig points and stations to the elevation data. The fit is good to roughly a kilometre, and every position in the film should be read at that resolution.
The first attack: 23–24 October
First light, 24 October: the regiment behind 22 NZ Battalion, and elements beyond the final objective, from 2 NZ Division's map of the sector (Pitt 1946, Map No. 5).
The barrage opened at about 9.30 pm and, in Major Hubert Blount's words, "continued to fire rapid without a break until about 4.30 in the morning" (letter, in Keoghane 2021, p. 131). New Zealand sappers cleared lanes through two Axis minefields: all four lanes through the first were open by 2.30 am and the second by 5 am (US Army 2006, App. K). "There was a good moon during the early part and in the leading tank it was quite easy to see the markings of the lane," Blount wrote.
B Squadron, in Crusaders, was reduced to two tanks by mines (Keoghane 2021, p. 129). A Squadron, with the new Shermans, and C Squadron, in Grants, came up on 22 Battalion's route, where the battalion commander had his men search and mark a mine-free track through their positions. "Not long after six o'clock, tanks of the leading squadron had been guided over the ridge," and the second heavy squadron followed, making the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry "the first, and only, regiment to break out beyond the infantry's final objective on this first morning of the Alamein battle" (Walker 1967, p. 274). 2 NZ Division's own map of the sector at first light shows the regiment just behind 22 Battalion and "Elements R. Wilts Yeo" beyond the final objective (Pitt 1946, Map No. 5).
The counter-attack came in the morning. "We set the first line of six on fire when they were about 1500 yards from us," Blount wrote (p. 132). The Commanding Officer was wounded. Tanks immobilised on mines drew fire onto the New Zealand infantry, and shortly after midday the four remaining runners were withdrawn into cover. Casualties to that time were 10 killed or missing and 32 wounded, including the Commanding Officer and seven other officers (Walker 1967, p. 302). Next day the regiment was taken out of the line and its last tanks were handed to the other two regiments (Walker 1967, p. 305).
Rebuilt
Over the following week the regiment took over repaired replacement tanks, "in a shocking state" (Keoghane 2021, p. 130). The brigade, down to 36 runners on the evening of 25 October, was built back to 80 Shermans and 52 Crusaders before the second attack (Walker 1967).
The second attack: 1–2 November
2 November: the regiment's route to the start line (the 863 grid line) and across the Rahman Track. Positions from the official history's map of Operation Supercharge.
Operation Supercharge gave 9th Armoured Brigade the hardest task of the offensive: to cross the infantry's new line and break the last anti-tank gun line along the Rahman Track, so that 1st Armoured Division could pass through. Montgomery said he was prepared for heavy casualties in the brigade (Walker 1967, pp. 391–2).
The brigade formed up near El Alamein station with 105 tanks and set off at about 7 pm on 1 November. The night was moonless and the tracks had been ground to powdery dust (p. 392). The Wiltshires followed the Hussars along Sun track and Boomerang track, halting to refuel at 1.45 am (pp. 392–3). On the way a field of British mines, laid irregularly, held them up until 6 New Zealand Field Company cleared it; the brigade's report praised the sappers' work as "beyond all praise" (US Army 2006, App. L). The New Zealand engineers marked the route with green lamps every tenth of a mile.
The attack was put back half an hour. At 6.15 am the regiment crossed the start line with 33 tanks: the twelve Crusaders of B Squadron in the lead, and C, Headquarters and A Squadrons level in line a short way behind (Walker 1967, pp. 393–4). The Crusaders overran gun pits and crossed the Rahman Track, marked by its line of telegraph poles, into heavier guns sited further west. The heavy squadrons came under fire as they reached the track and were ordered hull-down; A and C Squadrons engaged on the flanks (Keoghane 2021, p. 130). With wireless contact to B Squadron lost, the commanding officer had the two heavy squadrons lay smoke to cover its withdrawal. According to survivors, all but one of B Squadron's Crusaders went up in flames, after which the enemy switched his fire to the heavy squadrons (Walker 1967, p. 394). By about 8 am the regiment had nine tanks (p. 396).
Together the 3rd Hussars and the Wiltshires were credited with overpowering some 35 anti-tank guns, mainly Italian 47 mm and German 50 mm (p. 395). The brigade began the day with 94 tanks across the start line and ended it with about 24 fit to fight; the tank regiments had 163 casualties (p. 401), among them Trooper Herbert Daw of C Squadron, the film-maker's father, captured that morning after his tank was knocked out. The gun line, manned mainly by German gunners and short of ammunition, was close to breaking. On 4 November Tell el Aqqaqir was occupied unopposed and the Axis army was withdrawing (pp. 418–22). On 5 November the Commanding Officer wrote to all ranks: "This action will be recorded in the annals of regimental history, and the epic of B Squadron will live for all time" (Keoghane 2021, p. 130).
The fernleaf
Under 2nd New Zealand Division the regiment painted the Division's fernleaf on its vehicles. When it left Italy for England in September 1944, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Lloyd wrote to General Freyberg asking whether it might go on wearing the emblem. Freyberg replied from Headquarters, 2 N.Z. Division, on 22 November 1944: "we will be very proud to know you are continuing to wear the fernleaf as a reminder of Alamein days together." No association in the war, he wrote, "was happier than that between the Officers and men of the 9th Armoured Brigade and ours in the difficult days at Miteiriya Ridge and in the battle to break out." Of 2 November he added: "Your gallant advance that morning, though at great cost, broke the gun line and was the turning point in one of the most decisive battles of the war." He called the brigade's men "honorary New Zealanders" (letter printed in Pitt 1946). The Wiltshire squadrons of the Royal Wessex Yeomanry, B and Y, still wear the fern on their parade uniforms (Royal Wessex Yeomanry).
What is not settled
Times. Walker has the regiment's four runners pulled into cover shortly after midday on 24 October; Keoghane has Major Gibb ordering the remaining tanks back at 6 pm. On 2 November Walker gives permission to withdraw at 9.10 am; Keoghane has the regiment withdrawn at 4 pm with four tanks. These may be different moves; no source says so.
Positions. All are taken from 1942 maps drawn at small scale and fitted to modern elevation data; treat them as good to about a kilometre. The lanes in the film are a diagram, after 2 NZ Division's own diagram of its routes.
"100 per cent casualties." The often-quoted order to accept them appears in the New Zealand engineers' history but has not been traced to a primary document, and is not used.
The war diary. The regiment's war diary for 1942 (The National Archives, WO 169/4501; a copy at the Tank Museum) has not yet been read for this post.
Sources
R. Walker, Alam Halfa and Alamein, Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939–45 (Wellington: Historical Publications Branch, 1967). NZETC text.
US Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate, Breaching the "Devil's Garden": Operation Lightfoot, the Second Battle of El Alamein, 23 October 1942 (Appendices), AMSRD-CER-NV-TR-220A (Fort Belvoir, 2006).
S. Keoghane, Primus in Armis: An Illustrated History of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry (2021), ch. 6 and "Yeomanry Tales".
P. W. Pitt, Royal Wilts: The History of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry 1920–1945 (1946), maps, including 2 NZ Division Map No. 5 and the route of the regiment in Operation Supercharge.
The Eighth Army, September 1941 to January 1943 (HMSO, 1944).
M. Carver, El Alamein (London: Batsford, 1962), maps by Arthur Banks: the mined and defended areas of 23 October and the line of Miteiriya Ridge, redrawn on the terrain.
LiDAR Lens is, I think, the best and most complete free LiDAR tool there is for England and Wales. Every square metre of both countries' 1 m LiDAR is there, live, in a lens you drag across the map. You can light it from any angle, exaggerate it, and switch between hillshade, multi-direction hillshade, slope, local relief, sky-view factor, aspect and red relief, until faint banks, ditches, barrows and lost field systems jump out. Click any spot and it tells you the ground's measurements and the recorded sites nearby, with links straight to the records. Old OS maps, aerial photos and modern maps sit underneath for comparison. It works on a phone in the field as well as on a desktop. It costs nothing, there is no login, no account, and no adverts.
How it works
Type a place, postcode or grid reference into the search bar, or tap ◎ Me to go to where you are standing. Drag and resize the lens, and use the sliders for sun angle, exaggeration and contrast. "What’s here?" pins a point, gives its grid reference to copy, and lists nearby records: Historic England in England, and Cadw and Coflein in Wales. The profile tool draws a height section between two clicks, and Share copies a link to the exact view.
Fair use
The LiDAR is fetched live from the Environment Agency and the Welsh Government, through a Cloudflare cache. Each piece is fetched once and shared by everyone, the lens only asks for what is under it, and it backs off if a service is busy. The Environment Agency has confirmed it is happy for the data to be used this way, under its fair use policy.
Please respect landowners, and remember that scheduled monuments are protected by law. Seeing something in the LiDAR is not permission to go and look.
Credits
LiDAR, England: Environment Agency, Open Government Licence
LiDAR, Wales: Welsh Government (DataMapWales), Open Government Licence
Recorded sites, England: Historic England open data, Open Government Licence
Recorded sites, Wales: Cadw, and the National Monuments Record of Wales (Coflein, RCAHMW), Open Government Licence
New: LiDAR Lens England & Wales: the same viewer for all of England and Wales, fetching 1 m LiDAR (Environment Agency; Welsh Government) and the national records (Historic England; Cadw and Coflein) live as you look. Nothing is pre-built, so any field in either country can be examined, from zoom 13 inwards.
The county Lenses (Wiltshire, Ure henges) hold their LiDAR locally and are faster; the England & Wales Lens takes a few seconds to fill on new ground, and is instant on return.
Make your own LiDAR Lens
You do not need to be a programmer. An AI helper does the technical work; you make a few choices and open one free account.
What you get
A LiDAR Lens is a free map in your browser that takes away the trees and crops, so the shape of the ground shows: old banks, barrows, field systems, hollow ways. Drag a circular lens over an old Ordnance Survey map and the bare ground appears inside it. Turn the sun, change how the ground is drawn, and tap a spot to see what is recorded there. It works on a phone.
Get an AI helper that can do work on a computer for you, not just chat. Claude and Grok have both built a Lens. For most people the paid AI plan is the only cost.
Give it one message. Copy the message below, change the area to yours, and send it.
Make a few choices. It may ask you, or choose for you: which area, whether the map is open to everyone or behind a password, and which old maps go underneath.
Open one free account. To put your map online it will ask you to open a Cloudflare account. Cloudflare asks for a card when you switch on its storage, but a county-sized map fits in the free allowance.
Then let it work. The 700 km² Ure map took about an hour. A whole county takes longer: most of a day, mostly unattended. Start with something small, such as your parish or a valley.
The message to copy
Please read the instructions at https://github.com/TimDaw37/lidar-lens and build me a LiDAR Lens for [your area]. I am not a programmer: explain each step in plain English, and ask me before anything that costs money or needs an account.
For your AI helper: the build guide is PROTOCOL.md in the lidar-lens code (MIT licence). Configs for Wiltshire and a blank template are in configs/. Use open data only and keep showGuess:false on a public site.
What it costs
The AI helper: a paid plan. Prices vary and change.
Cloudflare (putting the map online): usually nothing. The free allowance is 10 GB of storage (a county takes about 3–4 GB) and 100,000 requests a day, plenty for a club, a society or a village. A busy public map might need the paid plan, about $5 a month.
Your computer: nothing extra, but a whole county needs about 30 GB of free space and a good connection. Some of the work can be done on the AI's own computer instead.
The LiDAR and the old maps: free (Environment Agency, Open Government Licence; National Library of Scotland, CC-BY).
Not in England?
The Environment Agency's 1 m LiDAR covers England. Wales has its own free LiDAR from Natural Resources Wales (DataMapWales), and Scotland from the Scottish Remote Sensing Portal. The build guide says how to use them.
Two rules
Open records only. National records from Historic England and OpenStreetMap are open. Your county's own Historic Environment Record is not: it needs the county's permission before any of it goes on a public map. Linking to it is fine.
Report, don't publish. If you spot something new, tell your county's Historic Environment Record. Don't post maps of possible new sites: they help illegal metal detectorists. Most land is private, and scheduled monuments are protected by law.
Have a go
If it gets stuck, tell it what went wrong and let it try again. Start small, and share the link when it works.
