Cliffe Fort

En un regard

Le château en bref

Cliffe Fort stands on the bank of the Thames, at the mouth of Cliffe Creek, on the Hoo Peninsula. It is one of the four forts built in the 1860s on the lower reaches of the river, following the Royal Commission of 1859-1860, to block an enemy fleet's route to London. Historic England regards it as one of the last iron-shielded casemated forts completed in England. D-shaped in plan, built of roughly dressed stone on the outside and brick inside, it housed powerful rifled muzzle-loading guns beneath its casemates. Towards the end of the 1880s, part of the work was converted into a launching station for the wire-guided torpedo invented by Louis Brennan: the launching rails visible at low tide and the remains of a retractable observation tower make it one of the best-preserved examples of this rare system. Armed with light guns until after the Second World War, the fort is now abandoned, flooded and partly collapsed. Privately owned and located within an industrial aggregates site, it is on the Heritage at Risk Register and closed to the public for safety reasons.