Clacton-on-Sea possible invasion beach-head for Napoleon and his Dutch allies. There was a large army and militia camp where Holland-on-Sea now stands. In 1810 5 Martello Towers were built there to guard the beaches between Jaywick and Holland. Clacton was still a small village and a few outlying hamlets when the Essex railway engineer Peter Bruff, the steamboat owner William Jackson, and a group of businessmen built a pier and hotel there in the 1871. In the 1880s the Great Eastern Railway reached it, and it grew into the largest seaside resort between Southend and Yarmouth, with some 10,000 people by
Clacton Spear the Clacton Spear is today generally regarded as a spear point. Clacton Spear The Clacton Spear, or Clacton Spear Point, is the tip of a wooden spear discovered in Clacton-on-Sea in 1911. It is 400,000 years old and the oldest known worked wooden implement. It is made of yew wood, shaped into a point, and when found was 387 mm long, 39 mm diameter and straight. But drying out during the first decades of storage shrank it to 367 mm by 37 mm, and warped it slightly into a curve. Treatment by wax impregnation in 1952 has apparently stabilized it.