Of all Britain’s historical strata of castle-ish things, I feel the mid-19th-century Palmerston forts are the least known and least appreciated. They and their strange design language – near-invisible buried forts with immense defensive ditches, colonnades of steel-shuttered, granite-faced casemates like the broadside of a stone frigate – belong to that period of frenetic mid-late 19th century military development where bonkers ideas like guns that weighed as much as ships, hand-cranked combat submarines, pneumatic cannon hurling dynamite charges, ship-killing bombs on long sticks and the naval ram all appeared on paper to be plausible war-winners, were built, achieved nothing, and vanished into obscurity.* Like the rest of that list, the Palmerston forts were obsolete almost as soon as they were built** (which is what makes them such fun!) Unlike the rest, getting rid of them once they’d proven useless was so much hassle they’re largely still there. And Plymouth had twenty-four of them built in the 1860s.

The ferry dropped me at the old Royal Naval Air Station Mount Batten (named, it turns out, for an interesting 17th century naval figure – so my Lord Louis joke was rubbish). A noticeboard showed various exciting marine experiments with fast pinnaces, early flying boats, and TE Lawrence on a motorbike, next to a stone marker with a slightly cartoonish Sunderland. The Mount itself boasted a closed proto-Martello-tower, a round stub of stone from the 1650s.***  Nearby, a place called the Galley Kitchen, behind all its exciting signs, was actually closed. Up on the Heights, I could make out hints of forts and a strange, huge, angular silhouette on the horizon.

Along the coast path, wide, windswept fields were scattered with astonishing numbers of benches, their commemorative plaques giving the feeling of a curious latter-day graveyard (surely there are never enough punters to actually use them all?) The choice of high or low path was decided by signs warning the low path had collapsed into the sea. The high road climbed through shoulder-height gorse over an infinity of stout black plastic planks made from recycled bin bags; the trees closed in on both sides, and I only had occasional glimpses of the bay and the breakwater (with its own, chequerboard-painted gun fort perched on the submerged ridge that protects Plymouth Sound) until I was almost on top of my first destination, Fort Bovisand.

Bovisand was a defensive wedding-cake, a single deck of giant rifled muzzle-loaders daring any warship to get within range enhanced by several generations of newer,  fancier guns on the hillside above it. Like a lot of these places, it’s got an immense long list of failed bankruptcy-inducing development attempts to redevelop it into something.**** Unfortunately (for me, in the short run) the current one appears to actually be liquid and functional, and the front door to the building site is very well protected, so my usual intrepid trespassing urban exploring wasn’t an option, and I had to settle with the view from the heights and the overgrown (but still unbelievably good) defensive ditch.

Undismayed, I set off back up the Staddon Heights, the immense ditch to my left (a presence felt but not seen, a deepness beyond a wall of foliage), to the golf course. A seashell path took me to the brambly outline of Brownhill Battery, which while accessible doesn’t boast a great deal to look at (summer is a bad time to see these places): the afterimages of old generator houses in the concrete, and a Victorian stone building built into the bastion with a rope leading down into mysterious depths. I must be getting old: ten years ago, when faced with a risky descent in a so-overgrown-as-to-be-invisible corner of an abandoned Victorian gun battery, itself so remote as to only even be known by the more incompetent users of the local golf course, I’d have dived right in. I took photos, instead; there was nothing there but rubbish.

The golf course itself has the same upsettingly architect’s-model manicured feeling  as golf courses everywhere, but there are several good curios up there – a concreted-up gun battery visible behind a gate, a pattern on the ground which was once the footings of a barrage balloon. Best, and most visible, is the enormous stone backstop to a (now thoroughly golfed over) high velocity rifle range, looming over everything. It’s an astoundingly large and weird looking structure, and I do wonder what passing ships made of it (probably “oh, that’s nice, I do so dislike being shot” once its function was explained.) A white-bottomed (roe?) deer looked up out of the undergrowth and bounced away.

Near the entrance of the golf course is the imposing front of the still-MoD-owned Fort Staddon (which was finished but never armed). I took pictures, eavesdropped on a flaming row between some locals at the club building, and headed down the old military road in the lilac gloom of dusk, passed by swishing cars and a single high-speed, extremely radical gentleman on a skateboard to the final fort. Fort Stamford is a large, fully-formed polygonal fort now being used as a caravan park, its walls filled with slightly modernised windows and its interior crowded with those quote-unquote “caravans” that are just mobile enough to not pay council tax. Bunnies play on well-mown turf slopes and little cars park in bays once built for 9″ rifled muzzle-loaders. It’s absolutely charming, and the sort of place I’d love to retire to if it wasn’t deliberately built a safe distance away from anything worth firing a cannon at.

The yellow harbour ferry I’d come across on was, ominously, moored halfway across the sound, and I sat at the Mount Batten jetty listening to the dismayed shrieking of its caged pontoons rising and falling with the wave, until happily its smaller but perfectly functional little sister showed up. I walked back along Madeira Road and across the Hoe, the massive angular shadow of the Citadel against the sky on my right hand and a twinkling band of buoys across the Sound on my left, and flopped at the guesthouse, legitimately shocked at how many blisters I didn’t have.

Out West 2021 

Out to Penryn – St Mawes and Falmouth – St Austell and Plymouth – The Forts of Staddon Heights – Drake’s Island and Saltash – Totnes and Exeter

^{* I don’t mean to be too dismissive here – at the time none of these would have been notably more or less bonkers than, say, ships made of metal, powered vehicles, revolving gun turrets, self-propelled torpedoes or sending messages down a wire using electricity, all of which went on to change the world.
** In this case strategically obsolete, rather than technologically; the underground, artillery-armed descendants of polygonal forts became less competitive but still worthwhile until the Second World War, which opened with a creative use of gliders and shaped charges by the Nazis against Eben-Emael, and ended with atomic bombs. But the French threat the Palmerstons were built against was comprehensively ended in 1870 by the Prussians annihilating the Second French Empire.
*** Actual Martello towers, as any fule kno, date from the Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars realisation that even the Royal Navy wasn’t big enough to always have a ship on station combined with a Corsican escapade in 1794 where the 16th century Genoese “Torre di Mortella” proved frighteningly resistant to cannonballs. Mount Batten Tower is younger than Mortella but older than  its misspelled namesakes.
**** When the magnificent Ian V. Hogg was writing Coast Defences of England and Wales 1856-1956,  the fort was still under military use as a diving school and was in his opinion the best preserved Palmerston fort left standing. I do hope they’re looking after it.}

Out West 2021 

Out to Penryn – St Mawes and Falmouth – St Austell and Plymouth – The Forts of Staddon Heights – Drake’s Island and Saltash – Totnes and Exeter