Fortress Kent by Roy Ingleton

Author:Roy Ingleton [Ingleton, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Wars & Conflicts (Other), Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781783036066
Google: k_rLDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2013-01-19T16:07:47+00:00

The east side of the castle

An account written around 1772 describes the Moat Battery (or bulwark) in the following terms:

Although dependent on the castle, it has its own peculiar officers; there are a captain, lieutenant, and master-gunner. It consists of a gate, having rooms over and on both sides of it, a house for the gunner, and a circular stone battery, to which there is a descent by a flight of steps. The entrance is on the east side, by a gradual ascent formed out of the chalk. A gunner, who formerly resided there, with great industry embellished the sides of the cliff with several parterres of flowers, which had a very pleasing effect: indeed, both the forms and the situation of these buildings conspire to render the view extremely picturesque and romantick.

It is difficult to reconcile such a description with an emplacement built solely for the purpose of causing death to anyone who presumed to attempt an invasion. Indeed, the site is much less attractive today, having been altered over the years, and very little of the original structure remains. In any event, the botanical displays were undoubtedly destroyed a couple of years later, since the Bulwark was updated and completely overhauled between 1775 and 1783. This included the building of the Guilford Battery in front of the Bulwark, equipped with four 32-pounder guns and a number of carronades. Three other separate emplacements, the North, Townsend and Amherst batteries, were also built at this time and similarly armed, but virtually no trace of these now exists.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Guilford Battery and Moat’s Bulwark were modernized and a spiral stairway was carved inside the cliff to link them to the castle. To prevent any invader using this stairway, it was designed with defensible landings at intervals, protected by doors with firing slits. Short passages were cut between the stairs and the cliff face to provide light, and these were used around a hundred years later as observation posts during the Second World War.

According to a sixteenth-century map, the bulwark consisted of a timber revetted platform, with a roughly circular front, approached by tunnels in the cliff, although the large semi-circular battery, which is its current most obvious feature, dates from around 1740.

Between 1794 and 1805, Colonel Twiss built the massive Horseshoe (or Avranches) and Hudson’s Bastions on the high ground to the east of the castle, together with East Arrow and East Demi Bastions below. The East Arrow Bastion was effectively destroyed when the East Arrow Barracks were built in the 1930s (which were in turn demolished in the late 1960s), and the other three are all in a generally poor condition and not open to the public. A tunnel was created between the East Demi Bastion and the castle during the nineteenth century so that mines could be detonated under it in the event of it being overrun.

There are, in fact, relics and remains of a number of nineteenth-century batteries in the Dover area,

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