militarysites

This is Fort McNutt, near Shelburne. The lighthouse in the distance is the Cape Roseway Light Station. The two guns are still in the woods on McNutt's Island, while the pictured lighthouse burned in 1959 and was replaced by a less distinctive one.

Thanks James Kyte - looking at historical photos of the former Cape Roseway lighthouse confirms your identification. Definitely out of our usual geographic coverage, so I will let heritage colleagues in Shelburne know we have this image.

It's possible that this is the 18th Anti-Aircraft Battery, which was a dummy site built near Purcell's Cove, just north of today's Oceanview Drive. From what I recall there is a foundation there similar in shape to the large building with two sections in the centre of this image. The two guns visible look like they might fit the description of the dummy guns mounted here, which were telephone poles in plywood enclosures.

Thanks www.flickr.com/photos/185577330@N08/ - I think I see where you mean - between Bluestone Rd and Rocklyn Rd. just before Purcell's Cove? It is so difficult to get a sense of the surrounding topography from this image.

Yes, that's the spot. There used to be a "Battery 18th Road" to the south that presumably once led to the site, but the historical connection was likely unknown to Civic Addressing and it was renamed to the generic and prosaic "Shipside Lane".

The suggested location is a possibility, but we'll hope for more definite confirmation.

In an email Peter Ziobrowski suggested this is the training battery at Osborne Head, which served as the location of the navy's gunnery school until 1989. He ruled out Purcell's Cove because it was an active Anti-Aircraft gun emplacement during the war, but the batteries in the image are not anti-aircraft. Any other conjecture on this location?

Date was more precisely fixed by researcher Will Flanagan based on comparison with other images of that time period.