Pilgrims Fort

En un regard

Le château en bref

Pilgrims Fort, more often called Fosterdown Fort, occupies a southern spur of the North Downs, about a kilometre south of Caterham, in Surrey. It is not a castle but a small late 19th-century military work. It belongs to the fifteen or so mobilisation centres planned to protect London from an invasion from the Continent. The site takes the form of a roughly circular enclosure facing south. It is bounded by a strong earth rampart, edged by a shallow ditch and a low counterscarp. Spiked iron railings originally closed it. It is entered from the north, through a gap in the rampart framed by low concrete walls, which opens onto an almost square parade ground. The magazine, buried in the front rampart, has remained remarkably intact. A four-room casemate faces it, and its stairs climb to the top of the bank. Outside the enclosure survive a pair of caretakers' cottages, now a private dwelling, and a barn-like brick tool store, separately listed. The whole illustrates the shift in British defence from a logic of fortified places to a mobile defence based on trenches.