Gibraltar continued to flex its Britishness by being cloudy and grey for our second day of Rock climbing. Despite being plausibly walkable from one end to the other in about an hour, there is a regular and well-run bus system, and as we headed to the cable car stop a #4 passed with BOTH WORLDS on the front and “Possibilities in every direction” on its side, the two between them promising a strange Gibraltarian existential limbo. The cable car station has numerous warnings, best of all a series of comics, about the various cunning ways the Barbary macaques (technically not apes but everyone calls them that) exploit distracted tourists to steal snacks.

Immediately after leaving the complex, we got a salutary lesson in monkey business when a mother ape (with tiny baby on her back!) leapt onto a fellow tourist’s backpack, opened it up and yanked out a couple of (cereal? chocolate?) bars, then ran off as he plaintively asked for them back. Thereafter, all rockapes were regarded with maximum caution, and any rustle from the undergrowth attracted suspicious glances and hisses of “Charlie’s in the trees”. Along the ridge line, keeping a very close eye on the monkeys (which pad gently around after you and insouciantly glance away if they notice you making eye contact) we encountered the “Skywalk”, one of those glass-floor-in-high-places things designed to induce vertigo. The view through the bottom wasn’t great (grips sensibly cut into the glass also make it quite hazy), but up top a replica Bofors gun mount had plaques showing the distances to various parts of the ex-empire and another commemorating the opening of the “Skywalk” by the chief minister and… Mark Hamill. The forces of dorkness are never far away. As we continued, past the monkeyproof bins, other rockapes leapt onto a passing tourist minivan and banged on the windows; the driver got out to remonstrate with them, but they couldn’t be reasoned with.

The next stage of our walk was in fact steeply downhill; down steps, mostly, along the top of the walls of Charles V* – a curtain wall that blocks off the upper Rock between two basically-impassable cliff areas. We really did wonder about this: it’s a shockingly expensive piece of engineering, but too high and too far from the town to be closely defended, and even for the mid-16th century too light to stop a serious assault. Later, we worked out it wasn’t for dealing with seriously well-armed hostile forces but for the Barbary pirates – like Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China,  more of a sort of military Serious Callers Only filter than a fighting position. We descended the stone staircase, having to lean awkardly past an obstructive monkey with a prominent erection.

I’m just trying to go down the staircase, why do you have to make this weird

We followed a track along the west face past the footings of more gun batteries and searchlight positions, heavy old pipes of water catchment infrastructure, the elegant but utterly pointless Windsor Bridge. There were few monkeys, but plentiful, er, evidence of their habitation, and every so often a bricked or gated archway led into the Rock (and presumably directly into the tunnel system.) Across the bay, the haze had lifted enough to clearly see Algeciras, if not Morocco. We clearly heard and saw an RAF Atlas transport come down – the first time I’ve seen one in action.

By this point in the day we were more than a little hot and thirsty, so it was fortunate our next stop featured both a freshwater tap and a huge cold limestone cavern. St Michael’s Cave was simultaneously the most physically impressive and least emotionally engaging hole in the ground I’ve ever been in. The limestone formations are some of the coolest I’ve ever seen, all frozen curtains and stacks of petrified broccoli; but the place has been hacked about from field hospital to concert venue, the air smells of despair and monkey piss, and they play shit-tier tepid club music and flash lurid colour-changing lights which quite rob the place of any atmosphere. One of the info boards noted a legend that the cave led to a tunnel that ran all the way under the Straits to Africa; the thought of that, and of walking miles and miles beneath the sea in dripping darkness, is the only part of the system which still retains any power.** In the site office, next to a closed souvenir shop, a phone rang forever.

Refreshed and cooled we headed up to the Spur Battery, a great ring of Edwardian concrete which once served as the barbette for a 9.2″ gun and still commands a magnificent view of the southern tip of Gibraltar. In the magazines below, I half-saw an assembly of old equipment by the light of a smartphone’s flash. Then (and that “then” encompasses about half an hour of climbing steep road in blazing heat) we made it to the very peak of the Rock, O’Hara’s Battery. O’Hara was a Regency-era Governor of Gibraltar known for surrendering both Yorktown to George Washington (little known fact: Cornwallis was in command but claimed he had a tummyache and sent O’Hara to actually surrender) and Toulon to a dashing young Revolutionary captain called Napoleon Bonaparte.

The question of whether Mr O’Hara was a complete cretin – it’s perfectly possible, after all, to lose to two of history’s great captains while still being fairly bright – is swiftly answered by learning that once given command of Gibraltar he a) decided that adding a few metres of height to the Rock by building a tower at its peak would let him see clearly into the harbour of Cadiz (100km away and behind a mountain range), b) he funded it out of his own pocket c) he had the stone iron-fastened, virtually guaranteeing the lightning strike that destroyed the tower almost immediately after its completion. After that it gets more complicated; the infographic tells an attractive story about HMS Wasp knocking the sundered remains of “O’Hara’s Folly” down with a shot from the harbour in 1888, but the last HMS Wasp foundered off Singapore in 1887, so who knows?

Regardless: below, it’s a magnificently preserved set of generators and magazine equipment, generators and shell hoists, all whitewash, green paint and polished brass with attendant mannequins in khaki battledress. Above, it’s a huge grey boxy housing for a 9.2″ gun easily capable of wasting anything in the port of Algeciras and able to at least frighten anything crossing the Straits on a clear day; two more, at the nearby Lord Airey’s Battery and the distant Breakneck Battery, are the last survivors of the fourteen Mark X guns Gib once boasted. We stayed there a good long while, boatspotting with my telescope and marinetraffic.com.

To get back down to the base of the Rock we took, the Mediterranean Steps, which are about as close as I’m (willingly) going to get to Cirith Ungol: a very steep, very rocky, very rugged descent into shadow towards the sea. A surprising number of clearly very fit locals came up the other way as we descended, and we were bemused by the flotilla of little boats chasing little splashes in the immense shadow of the Rock until we realised they were dolphin-watchers.

“This is the part of the trip I feel Jay and Mark could appreciate.” “Please don’t say ‘trip’ here and now.” “I’ll send you a postcard mate.”

At the base – past caves ancient and modern, a derelict pumping station and dozens of abandoned observation and fighting positions – we found one final empty 9.2″ emplacement, now the home to a fun but irredeemably tacky monument to the Pillars of Hercules. We made a quiet visit to Jew’s Gate Cemetery, utterly peaceful in the lee of the rock with its spiderweb of elevated walkways carrying visitors above its rows of bone-white tombstones. And then it was time for the bus – just one way – back into town.

* That’s Charles V the 16th century Holy Roman Emperor – not the 14th century Charles V of France, nor the 17th century Charles V of Naples, nor the failed 18th century pretender Charles V of Spain. Charles V of Sweden never actually existed and starting the line at IX was a fiction by the House of Vasa to give themselves more of a pedigree. Dynastic history is bonkers.

** Honestly, it makes me want to read Journey to the Centre of the Earth all over again.

Gibraltar 2020

Arrival, old town, Alameda – Fortifications old and older – Atop the Rock – Museums, models and an unfeasibly large gun – Gorham’s Caves, south and east