Plymouth Breakwater Fort

En un regard

Le château en bref

Set in the middle of the anchorage, about a hundred metres behind the centre of the Plymouth Sound breakwater, the Breakwater Fort is an oval Victorian sea fort. It is one of the seventy or so works launched in England after the report of the 1859 Royal Commission, when the expansion of the French navy raised fears of invasion — the famous "Palmerston's follies". Its mission was to close the passage between the Picklecombe and Bovisand batteries and to protect ships anchored in the shelter of the breakwater. Founded not on the breakwater but on the Shovel Rock, in some fifteen metres of water, it was begun in 1861; its foundations, laid by divers, were completed in 1865. The original four-storey granite design was abandoned, as the masonry could not withstand the recoil of the guns, in favour of an iron-framed concrete structure armoured with teak and iron. Armed from 1879, it received around twenty heavy guns in casemates. A signal station for the port during both World Wars, it left military use in 1976. Its exterior still retains in places the black-and-yellow chequerboard pattern that disguised the embrasures.