The brickwork is different above and below that open course, but both sections have been hit. Maybe a couple of courses above the open one on a closer look.
Thank you very much The trouble with me is that im all over London looking for WW1/WW2 bomb/bullet damage and sometimes have to take breath in case I get a bit carried away. sorry about the mystery title of the thread it is on a bridge over the river Lea ,Wathamstow Marshes Story is just after the war serving soldier took son and had a machine gun of unknown type and son fired off a burst against the wall Unknown distance from the wall. I never believe urban myths and all that but having seen it and touched it they do look look like bullet holes.I am always the first to debunk stuff Again it is quite possible the Home Guard or other sorts could have used it as a back drop for practice albeit a big dangerous This side of the bridge faces the marshes. A V2 landed about 1/2 mile away but that side of the bridge is away from the blast area
The damage might be consistent with a Sten or Thompson. I'd have thought a Bren or BAR would have made a bigger mess.
Despite so much black paint, here's my plot of probable bullet craters inferring a single target near 'X' - from which I read a radiating pattern. The trail above the 'X' bends leftward - suggesting a side-pulling lightweight Sten IIRC ? Steve
Hmm. I'm surprised at this conundum not having grown legs over the past week - having mainly contributed my hopefully-objective plot as food for thought only partially supporting the Sten idea ! Don't the varous patterns suggest several different guns ? Or would one gun vary that much according to several operators' skills ? Does no concentration apparent anywhere atypically mean NO TARGET ? Any relevant URLs - esp. re the father/son story ? Non-natively regarding nearby Epping Forest as a better gunnery test venue, anyway, I can't even work out exactly where this is supposed to be, from Clive's description, as the basis for further research. So how about please giving us a, say, a suitably-tweaked version of StreetMap's Walthamstow result @ 50k - greatly zoomed in and with the red arrow accurately moved to pinpoint your camera's location.
Thanks for your input hasnt grown legs mate because I think you have solved it and it makes sense Just from a friend as we walked in that area it was pointed out to me Lads dad brought home weapon from WW2 Lad was given chance to fire said weapon and assume the kick would have been a shock for him Lad would have been 10 ish As stated before I never go with urban myth but a good mate who pointed it out in passing and I thought would be worth a mention on here but does look like bullet or shrapnel markings location As you can see the bridge wall faces onto the marsh and just after the war it would have been completely overgrown Google Maps
Miles from London Urban myth put to bed Highworth Church a few miles from Swindon a old gent told me that a Home Guard Sgt after a few pints put bullet hole through the tail of the indicator on the weather vain on the top of the flag pole,a few years later I had to repair the weather vain sure enough there was a square patch of lead over the hole .Must of got feed up waiting for the invasion
So, ex pede Herculem, you automatically prejudge all hearsay to be bogus? Not all 'urban legends', as most folk call such stories, turn out to be mythical, I'd have you know. Nor has my input, so far, really solved this by a long chalk ! "You're crazy. You think you've found a pattern and you're forcing everything else to fit it." (Lewton under Watch interrogation in Discworld Noir). Graffiti on Horseshoe Bridge © Des Blenkinsopp :: Geograph Britain and Ireland So, if I've correctly deduced this to concern the early-C19 tow-horse tamp wall of what has been variously known, in roughly-chronological order, as High Bridge, Horse Shoe Bridge, Horseshoe Bridge and Horseshoe Footbridge, then that brickwork would be a couple of centuries old - bags of time in which to suffer much abuse including the modern graffiti of which the LPA (Local Planning Authority) seem oddly protective in another instance. I found online tales of local WW2 strafing by axis fighters - e.g. the Xylonite factory. as mentioned here, and this PDF account describing 'sparks' in its penultimate paragraph - but none apparently aimed at this hardly-strategic riverside ramp. But then, of course, bridges traditionally tempt 'gung ho' pilots to risk underflying them - not to mention the temptation to maybe have yet more fun letting loose unspent ammo so as not to return to base with any left to beg questions about their motives in the eyes of their commanders. The only personal admission I did find of local gun-firing was p3 para 2 of this PDF account by a lad who let off steam with an airgun in his parents' back garden - just look out for "Between the shed doors was the air gun target area,". 2 broad references to this bridge maybe worth adding FTR are: * Edith's Streets: River Lea - Springfield (blog - ~5/6 down l-o-n-g page) * Horseshoe Bridge No 20 – Gazetteer – CanalPlanAC But please take them both with a pinch of salt as 'shovelware' sites - with Edith's rendered far dodgier by her patent confusion and abject failure to yet answer the sole question, reasonably asked by an anonymous reader way back in 2012, about her references.
Oh, righty ho with thanks, I thought you were contradicting yourself until the proverbial penny finally dropped - I hadn't realised the Essex end was raised high enough to sneakily hide an extra back wall! But please recall that I sought "to pinpoint your camera's location" somewhat more accurately than you did - something more like THIS showing this - Incidentally presswise, the BNA unsurprisingly seemed to have no relevant London press reports and the most notable local gun story I could find anywhere was 1909's Tottenham Outrage merely involving pistols as if that weren't bad enough. So, as my faith in local historians is low for any event likely to have eluded usual records, I'd suggest pumping your mate for their sources if you really hope to nail this poser beyond mere conjecture. Any trivial detail might help to tip the scales ... My bulleted Qs still stand, BTW, mainly with HG experimentation in mind as local outfits, like Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, must surely have had their own small arms test ranges. I can well imagine, for instance, an HG training sergeant maybe wanting to privately test an SMG to better understand any foibles needing to counteracted in, say, the inexperienced hands of a junior 'guinea pig' maybe borrowed from home - or even several SMGs if his unit were unbelievably lucky enough to have been offered an issue choice. One such trainer was my dad who once railed to me about trainees not habitually respecting the Sten's RHS spent cartridge ejection path by keeping well clear of it. And it's that strong staccato sideways ejection recoil, of course, that yanks it leftwards in the hands of greenhorns not braced to resist that - in addition to the usual backward recoil typically resulting in high shots. PS: Just restoring a useful OpenStreetMap view I accidentally deleted yesterday.
No answer yet - pending feedback - just brain-dumping trivia of possible interest here: 4 better photos of this eastern end-wall: * Footbridge, Lea Navigation © N Chadwick :: Geograph Britain and Ireland * 3 Flickr links @ Guide to taking photos at Tree Flood Water Leyton ... ShotHotspot This is not 'Mural on the Marsh' - elsewhere hereabouts under a viaduct crossing 2 more aliases: * 'Springfield Bridge' * 'River Ley' - presumably hence Leyton (Ley-town) & Leytonstone Walthamstow Memories - Walthamstow at War - only mentioning a V1 strike on the town rather than its namesake marsh BBC - WW2 People's War - The Odd Job Man - incidentally mentioning Browning MGs in its 'Pillbox' section The Tottenham Outrage - Casebook: Jack the Ripper Forums - yeah, 1909, but discussing a near miss on Churchill's bonce; his name first cropping up in post 7 Re V1 attacks, BTW, I can't resist retelling one of my dad's anecdotes here ... Going to work, one day, his bus suddenly stopped for no apparent reason. Thus alerted, they next heard a stuttering sound most had come to associate with doodlebugs. But, as they tensely waited to see where it would hit, they were overtaken by the clueless rider of a badly-misfiring moped who, suffice it to say, proved somewhat less than popular with all those aboard said London bus.
