Your History Here

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"Hello, and welcome to YourHistoryHere, the place where you can share your knowledge about those unusual places, buildings or things that make places interesting to live. This site is on limited circulation at the moment, and is only supposed to be a mySociety demo, not a big posh project like PledgeBank. It may not be obvious, but the most important feature of YourHistoryHere is the construction of an underlying system for collecting and sharing geographic annotations in an open syndicated format, so you can use the yummy local data people leave for your own purposes. We're building two sites that show how this can be useful, this one and Placeopedia.com, and we'd love to share the code for other ideas. Anyone want to build WhereIHadMyFirstKiss.com? Tom Steinberg, mySociety Director - 23/08/2005"

About This Place...

German WW1 Fleet

Scapa Flow in Orkney was used as the home port for the British Fleet during both World Wars. At the end of World War 1, the German fleet was brought here and scuttled to dispose of the ships and to create a barrier preventing access to the harbour from the East. More ships were scuttled between the wars, and during World War 2, although many of the German ships were raised from the sea bed and taken to Rosyth for salvaging. Also during World War 2, a German U-boat managed to make its way through the harbour defences and sink the Royal Oak. This prompted the British to create what are now known as the Churchill Barriers - a series of four concrete barriers between the south islands. You can drive over the barriers from Mainland Orkney all the way to South Ronaldsay and will actually see wrecked ships on either side as you cross them.

Long. -2.89490, Lat. 58.87768 | written on 17th Oct 2005 by Chris | Email this to a friend | abusive?

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