As a child in the fifties and
early sixties I used to love rowing to the island when the lake was
low and finding pieces of the plane. Of course most of it had been taken
away by the Irish Army very soon after the accident and there were only
pieces of aluminium cladding, spars and other pieces of twisted metal
left to find. Many people at the time used to feed their hens off pieces
of the flat sections. It is still possible to find pieces of aluminium
in the water although tourists have found and taken away most of them
now.
Many local people remember
the crash and hearing the plane circling for ages. Some thought they
were going to be bombed! Just before the crash a local woman heard a
bang on the roof of her house about a mile and a half away. She thought
a bomb had been dropped which hadn't exploded. Some days later, she
had a man go up on the roof to investigate. He found a wooden box, painted
RAF Blue, which he took down. It contained a 'Hand Bearing Compass',
known as a Type 06A. The 06A compass handle contains a torch, which
may be used independently but when normally screwed to the base of the
compass illuminates the rose for taking night bearings through the prism.
On the inside of the hinged lid of the box there is a rubber stamped
mark indicating that the compass was checked at the Admiralty Compass
Observatory on 30 May 1942. As I had always coveted the compass, the
woman, who had been a family friend and had known my great grandparents,
gave it to me sometime in the late sixties.
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