Geograph - photograph every grid square

Skewjack has a long history in telecommunications. During WWII RAF Sennen was based here because it was a good location for radio line-of-sight towards the Atlantic. 100m high masts in adjoining fields supported radar antennae as part of an early warning radar station which could detect ships and low flying aircraft up to 20 miles away in the Western Approaches. Some of the equipment was housed in camouflaged bunkers at nearby Trebehor Farm, which still exist SW3724 : Camouflaged wartime bunker at Trebehor. After the RAF station closed the accommodation buildings became Skewjack Surf Village - see the excellent website here Link. The surf village closed in the mid 1980s and nothing remains of the original buildings. This building was constructed in about 2001 as a terminus for submarine optical cables, operated by FLAG (Fiber Link Around the Globe) Telecom. The building houses the ends of two submarine fibre cables. One that crosses
the Atlantic to Long Island nearly 6000km away and the other cable that
crosses the channel to France in Brittany. The fibre optic cable to America is constructed with 6 fibre pairs, each capable of carrying 40 separate light wavelengths and each wavelength can carry 10GBit/s of traffic. This gives a total capacity of 2.4Tbit/s per cable making Skewjack one of the largest bandwidth communications stations in the world. The building won the 2002 CPRE RIBA Cornwall Architecture Award for Local Architects Poynton Bradbury Winter Cole.