Knowles Battery

En un regard

Le château en bref

Knowles Battery, which Historic England calls Knowle Battery, occupies a spur above a small tributary valley of the Tamar, north of Plymouth, between Agaton Fort and Woodland Fort. A secondary work of the 1860s land ring, it was meant to cover a specific sector and support the neighbouring forts with its fire in the defence of Devonport Dockyard. The battery forms an irregular four-sided enclosure made up of stretches of rampart and ditch. It was designed for thirteen guns in the open and a fourteenth in a Haxo casemate, with several magazines at the rear. Its most telling feature remains the two-storey guardhouse, pierced with a gun embrasure on each face, and the loopholed gorge wall with its musketry gallery, preserved to its full height on the east side. Disarmed at the end of the 19th century, the battery served as a base for the barrage balloons protecting Plymouth during the Second World War. In the 1960s a school was built on the site, erasing most of the gun positions. The whole now lies within the grounds of Knowle Primary School and is not open to the public.