Block House

En un regard

Le château en bref

On a promontory in Mount Edgcumbe park, a few hundred metres from the Cremyll landing stage, this small Tudor blockhouse stands guard at the entrance to the Hamoaze, the Tamar estuary that is now home to Devonport naval base. Across the channel it faces Devil's Point and Stonehouse, on the Plymouth side, with which it formed an artillery barrier across this narrow passage. Historic England records it as the "Blockhouse at the Garden Battery", after the neighbouring 19th-century battery. The building is modest in size — a square roughly six metres across — but remarkably complete: metre-thick walls of slate rubble, an entrance door on the landward side defended by a plunging gun slit and bar holes, three externally splayed embrasures and a crenellated roof platform. It is one of twenty-seven 16th-century blockhouses still surviving on the east, south and south-west coasts of England. Its military history continued well beyond the Tudors: it was used against the Parliamentarian fleet during the Civil War, brought back into service in 1717, then repaired and rearmed around 1800. A plaque on the east wall summarises these stages. The interior is not open to visitors, but the building can be freely viewed from the free paths of the country park, on the coastal footpath.