Garrison Point Fort

En un regard

Le château en bref

At the north-western tip of the Isle of Sheppey, Garrison Point Fort guards the mouth of the Medway, the approach to the Chatham dockyards and the port of Sheerness. The present semicircular work belongs to the generation of great coastal forts decided upon after the 1860 Royal Commission report, one of the most ambitious fortification programmes of Victorian England. The site was fortified much earlier. According to the Kent Historic Environment Record, three forts followed one another here: a square Tudor blockhouse, then a fort begun in 1667 and destroyed the same year in the Dutch raid on the Medway, and finally the bastioned work of Sir Bernard de Gomme. Of the latter, two stone lions, bastions and ditches survive, damaged by the 19th-century gun positions. Completed in 1872, the fort has two tiers of casemates protected by iron shields behind a granite face about 4.4 metres thick. Armed until the mid-20th century, it now lies within the port estate and is not open to the public. It is listed Grade II and included in the scheduled monument of the Sheerness defences.