The Eyes and Teeth of Old England

JIA Hong Kong

China,Hong Kong

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Le Hameau de Mavarin

France,Megève

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Les Fermes de Marie

France,Megève

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Strolling the deserted beach at Shingle Street on a cold winter’s afternoon I could hardly imagine hearing another human voice challenge the oystercatchers and gulls, let alone the roar of cannon and scream of men dying among the stones. Yet at the turn of the 19th century this lonely Suffolk shore was one of those that the British government feared had been pinpointed by Napoleon Bonaparte for his unstoppable armies to rush ashore, the launch of an invasion that would sweep the Little Emperor triumphantly to London and complete victory in Europe.

At the back of the beach I found a silent witness to that dreadful national apprehension – the dark bulk of a Martello tower, weather-stained and sombre. This stubby oval fort with its single seaward facing eye of a window has brooded over the shingle for almost two hundred years - ever since our own Little Admiral, Horatio Nelson, led the line so dashingly against Britain’s enemies on the high seas of Europe. Nelson himself died gloriously at Trafalgar a few years before the Martello tower was erected at Shingle Street. It was one of the last of a chain of more than a hundred, built between 1805 and 1812, that looped the coasts of Sussex, Kent, Essex and Suffolk, those points that were nearest to Occupied Europe.

There is something about such buildings that compels you to stare and speculate. A thousand years of invasion threats, real or imagined, has adorned our coastline with a remarkable, motley collection of towers, forts, castles, gun emplacements and devices for listening and looking. In their crumbling, salt-rusted decay they tell a spellbinding tale of sustained national vigilance - of national emergencies and paranoias, of scares that should never have reached the pitch they did, and of threats that were all too real.

My first view of the oldest fortification I’ve visited around the coasts of Britain was a dramatic, not to say a hair-raising one, banking at 45° round the Iron Age broch on the Shetland island of Mousa in the co-pilot’s seat of a Loganair Islander like a Spitfire after a Me109. The sight of the lonely stone tower on the naked shore sparked an on-going fascination with the old forts and defences of the British coast.

The past 500 years in particular have left a rich legacy. It was invasion by the great Catholic powers of Europe, the French and the Spanish, that King Henry VIII feared when in the 1530s and 40s he built a formidable string of castles such as Deal and Walmer in Kent, and Hurst Castle on the Solent, along the south coast. Medieval castles had had hugely high walls, but these were forsaken in favour of low-walled, semi-circular bastions or gun emplacements surrounding a central keep, a design that could bring dozens of guns to bear on an enemy.

A century later it was the Dutch who posed the threat, cheekily sailing up the Thames to bombard the environs of London. The fort at Landguard on the southernmost tip of the Suffolk coast, a massive affair that still squats on its spit, beat off a Dutch raid in 1667. That was a rare example of a coast fort that actually saw action – generally the threat was enough to deter attack. The Tudor fort at Tilbury, just downriver from London, was revamped in 1672, its new pentagonal shape supposedly capable of repelling attack by sea or land. This very impressive stronghold stands incongruously in the industrial hinterland of the Thames, its seaward gate carved with military hardware in a fine flight of martial fantasy.

Although Napoleon Bonaparte formed an active threat to Britain for only the first fifteen years of the 19th century, his shadow lay long across that era. Great redoubt fortresses were built at Harwich, Dymchurch and Eastbourne at the same time as the Martello towers. Later in the century a renewed threat of invasion by the French under Bonaparte’s great-nephew, Emperor Napoleon III, saw a huge expansion in coast defences overseen by Prime Minister Lord Henry Palmerston – the famous ‘Palmerston’s Follies’.

The massive Fort Nelson on Portsdown Hill outside Portsmouth is a great example of these mid-Victorian coast defences, as are a whole scatter of forts and batteries in the Solent and around the Isle of Wight, all built to protect the Royal Navy’s dockyard and home base of Portsmouth from an attack that never materialised. Most poignant of all the Palmerston’s Follies, for my money, are the batteries on the two tiny islands of Steepholm and Flatholm in the Bristol Channel, where black-backed gulls nest in the muzzles and perch on the breeches of rusty old cannon that never fired a shot in anger.

So to the 20th century and the coastal fortifications of two World Wars, from pillboxes to gun pits by way of some weird and wonderful sites. At Dungeness stand concrete ‘sound mirrors’ that collected engine sounds in pre-radar days from enemy aircraft not yet in sight. The massive strongholds of Bull Sand and Haile Sand Forts rise from the waters of the Humber estuary. Most striking of all are the cunningly positioned towers and blockhouses on Inchmickery in the Firth of Forth; they gave the little island the silhouette of a battle-cruiser, to confuse and deter U-boats contemplating an attack on the naval dockyards at Rosyth.

There are relics of the Cold War, too. Maybe the most bizarre, and certainly the largest, is the enormous fan shape, its ‘ribs’ half a mile long, that lies imprinted on the shingle spit of Orford Ness on the stark Suffolk coast. It marks the site of the aerials of Cobra Mist, a hush-hush radar device that would have detected hostile plane and rocket launches behind the Iron Curtain if it had not been plagued by that most mundane of domestic annoyances – a background hum.

Seven miles of bleak shoreline separate Cobra Mist and the gaunt Martello tower at Shingle Street. They are divided by an incalculable gulf of history and of technological change. What links them to each other and to the rest of the great chain of Britain’s coastal defences is this island nation’s primary requirement, one that history has always demanded and the future insists on – a sharp and effective set of eyes, ears and teeth for that moment when the enemy’s sails appear on the horizon.

Six of the Best


Hurst Castle
Near Milford-on-Sea, Hampshire. Access on foot (3 miles there-and-back) or boat from Keyhaven)
Tel 01590-642500 or 642344; www.hurst-castle.co.uk
Open April-October
A Tudor fort, built on the Solent by King Henry VIII and massively extended in the 19th century, in a superbly dramatic location at the seaward end of a long shingle spit

Deal Castle
English Heritage
. In Deal, Kent. Tel 01304-372762; www.theheritagetrail.co.uk
Open April-September.
One of the best-preserved of King Henry VIII’s coast forts against Catholic invasion

Dymchurch Martello Tower
English Heritage
. High Street, Dymchurch, Kent
. Tel 01304-211067; http://www.martello-towers.co.uk/south-coast/towers/24.htm
Open April-October (telephone to check)
Martello tower restored as a museum, showing you the internal arrangements and armoury

Aldeburgh Martello Tower
Landmark Trust
. On southern edge of Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
The largest and most northerly of the Martello towers, situated on the shingle spit at upmarket Aldeburgh – and you can stay in it!

Spitbank Fort
In the Solent 1 mile off Southsea, Hampshire.
Tel 02392-504207 or 01329242077; www.spitbankfort.co.uk
Day trip visits June-August (01983-564602) via ferry from Portsmouth Historic Dockyard
This massive circular fort of 1864-8, a mile from land, is a very fine example of a ‘Palmerston’s Folly’. These days it wears many guises – museum, pub, disco, Sunday lunch venue and corporate meeting place.

Inchmickery, Inchgarvie, Inchkeith In the Firth of Forth, just downstream of Forth railway bridge.
Seafari Adventures – Hawes Pier, South Queensferry, and also at Newhaven Harbour, Leith Docks, Edinburgh (tel 0131-331-5000; www.seafari.co.uk). NB – no landings
Cruise round the islands in the Firth of Forth, heavily fortified during the First and Second World Wars. Inchmickery, mocked up like a warship, is especially striking.