Also at Campbell Park:
Gnomon - Shadow Caster
Milton Keynes - A Modern Temple to the Sun
The Labyrinth from above
Milton Keynes just happens to be the home of the largest Bronze age gold hoard as well as for the WWII secret codebreakers - (Ultra, Lucy, Magic), and the first computer
Colossus.
The Milton Keynes Hoard
The Milton Keynes Hoard is a hoard of Bronze Age gold found in September 2000 in a field at Monkston Park in Milton Keynes, England. The hoard consisted of two torcs, three bracelets, and a fragment of bronze rod contained in a pottery vessel. The inclusion of pottery in the find enabled it to be dated to around 1150–800 BC.
Weighing in at 2.020 kg (4.45 lb), the hoard was described by the British Museum as "one of the biggest concentrations of Bronze Age gold known from Great Britain" and "important for providing a social and economic picture for the period". The hoard was valued at £290,000 and is now in the British Museum.
Several other antiquities, including Romano-British hoards, have been found within a 10–12 miles (16–19 km) radius of the centre of Milton Keynes.
Top Secret WWII Codebreakers and "Ultra", "Lucy", and "Magic"
Bletchley Park - "Once the
top-secret home of the World War Two Codebreakers, Bletchley Park is now a vibrant heritage attraction. Step back in time to experience the stories of the extraordinary achievements of the men and women that worked here."
Ultra - The designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park.
Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used (Most Secret) and so was regarded as being Ultra Secret. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence.
The code name Boniface was used as a cover name for Ultra. In order to ensure that the successful code-breaking did not become apparent to the Germans, British intelligence created a fictional MI6 master spy, Boniface, who controlled a fictional series of agents throughout Germany. Information obtained through code-breaking was often attributed to the human intelligence from the Boniface network. The U.S. used the codename Magic for its decrypts from Japanese sources, including the "Purple" cipher.
Much of the German cipher traffic was encrypted on the Enigma machine. Used properly, the German military Enigma would have been virtually unbreakable; in practice, shortcomings in operation allowed it to be broken. The term "Ultra" has often been used almost synonymously with "Enigma decrypts". However, Ultra also encompassed decrypts of the German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machines that were used by the German High Command, and the Hagelin machine.
Lucy - An intriguing question concerns the alleged use of Ultra information by the "Lucy" spy ring, headquartered in Switzerland and apparently operated by one man, Rudolf Roessler. This was an extremely well informed, responsive ring that was able to get information "directly from German General Staff Headquarters" – often on specific request. It has been alleged that "Lucy" was in major part a conduit for the British to feed Ultra intelligence to the Soviets in a way that made it appear to have come from highly placed espionage rather than from cryptanalysis of German radio traffic. The Soviets, however, through an agent at Bletchley, John Cairncross, knew that Britain had broken Enigma. The "Lucy" ring was initially treated with suspicion by the Soviets. The information it provided was accurate and timely, however, and Soviet agents in Switzerland (including their chief, Alexander Radó) eventually learned to take it seriously. However, the theory that the Lucy ring was a cover for Britain to pass Enigma intelligence to the Soviets has not gained traction
Magic - Magic was set up to combine the US government's cryptologic capabilities in one organization dubbed the Research Bureau. Intelligence officers from the Army and Navy (and later civilian experts and technicians) were all under one roof. Although they worked on a series of codes and cyphers, their most important successes involved RED, BLUE, and PURPLE.
RED
In 1923, a US Navy officer acquired a stolen copy of the Secret Operating Code codebook used by the Japanese Navy during World War I. Photographs of the codebook were given to the cryptanalysts at the Research Desk and the processed code was kept in red-colored folders (to indicate its Top Secret classification). This code was called "RED".
BLUE
In 1930, the Japanese government created a more complex code that was codenamed BLUE, although RED was still being used for low-level communications. It was quickly broken by the Research Desk no later than 1932. US Military Intelligence COMINT listening stations began monitoring command-to-fleet, ship-to-ship, and land-based communications.
PURPLE
Main article: Purple code
After Japan's ally Germany declared war in the fall of 1939, the German government began sending technical assistance to upgrade their communications and cryptography capabilities. One part was to send them modified Enigma machines to secure Japan's high-level communications with Germany. The new code, codenamed PURPLE (from the color obtained by mixing red and blue), was baffling.
PURPLE, like Enigma, began its communications with the same line of code but then became an unfathomable jumble. Codebreakers tried to break PURPLE communiques by hand but found they could not. Then the codebreakers realized that it was not a manual additive or substitution code like RED and BLUE, but a machine-generated code similar to Germany's Enigma cipher. Decoding was slow and much of the traffic was still hard to break. By the time the traffic was decoded and translated, the contents were often out of date.