Starfish Long Wood - ruins
A cache which takes you to an exposed spot above Bonnyton Moor. After visiting GZ it is well worth walking the few metres to the top of Boshee Hill for great views of the windfarm, the city and south east to Lochcraig Reservoir and Bennan Loch. To get to GZ, walk along the road south west from the parking waypoint. Pass the works on your right hand side and then pop over the rusty gate into the field. In winter this spot is certainly too wet/muddy for a cache 'n' dash. Once in the field it can be a bit boggy, so stout shoes or boots are recommended.
Glasgow was protected by various Starfish sites located on its surrounding hillsides during the Second World War. Starfish was the code name given to a system of Special Fire or SF decoys. A World War II Starfish decoy site (SF13e), part of the Clyde AA battery defences, was located here. The Starfish had three distinctive groups of basket fires which would have been packed with pitch and fuel soaked materials, fire break trenches and a decoy control bunker. The idea was that fires would be set on the hills at night as decoys so that German bombers mistook the hills for Glasgow City/ the Clyde shipyards and dropped their payload harmlessly on the hillsides instead. The cache is placed at the site of the remains of the control bunker, rather than at the basket fire sites, but these basket sites are identified on a map on the Secret Scotland page (see related web page) and can be visited too.
Towards some of Long Wood
The control bunker here is in ruins. We think that the bunker originally sat on the foundations nearby (currently housing an animal feeding thingy). The part of the roof where the cache is hidden represents an escape hatch, possibly on the roof of the bunker. If you find the site interesting, like we do, then a much better example of a control bunker can be seen at Clachanman's Starfish Newlands.
Last owner check on the cache - 6.1.13