There are around a dozen interlocking bunker sites along the beach front between Bleriot Plage and Sangatte to the west of Calais with some designed as defensive positions and others built in support of those sites.
Stp82 Rabe – which stands west of a large holiday park in the dunes behind the beach – is one such site and features two R512 ammunition storage bunkers, a WaKoFest anti-aircraft gun emplacement, and a rare special construction Mehrkammer-Wasserbehalter (MKWB) water storage bunker.
One of the R512 bunkers and the WaKoFest AA bunker are completely overgrown and inaccessible but the other R512 can be accessed with care, although until recently had been used as accommodation by migrants so is filled with a lot of undesirable rubbish.
The stand out build here is the MKWB water bunker though. Accessible through some spiky shrubs, you can walk between two long flanking walls and go inside the building only as far as a small doorway. The inside of the bunker is blocked by a concrete wall with a high level opening. Climbing to see through the opening – which has an upwards hinged steel door – you can see several dividing sections where the water was stored for use at sites in the area. On the inner walls there are protruding pipes for filling and draining of water.