Palmerston Fort
The Palmerston Forts are a group of forts and similar structures on the coast of Great Britain .
The forts were built in the Victorian era because of fears about the strength of the French Navy and after an eager debate in Parliament over the justification of the cost under the requirements of the Royal Commission on the Defense of the United Kingdom in 1860. Her name comes from her reference to Lord Palmerston , who was Prime Minister at the time and who supported the idea.
The facilities were also called Palmerston's Follies , in part because the armament of the first of its kind pointed inland to protect Portsmouth from a land-based attack. This gave the impression that they were misaligned to repel a French attack. Another reason was its questionable military value and a Folly dictionary definition is "an expensive ornamental building with no practical value". They were criticized because by the time they were completed, any fear of attack from France was over, mainly because of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and because their gun technology was now out of date. Palmerston forts were the most costly and extensive system of solid defenses ever created in the UK in peacetime.
About sixty years earlier there was a comparable period of defense construction. At that time a few hundred round towers were built for the same purpose (mainly along the coasts of Sussex , Kent and Suffolk to protect London ), called the Martello Towers . But these were already obsolete by the time the Palmerston Fort was built.
The new defenses were built to protect a number of key areas on the coasts of Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Islands , such as: B.
- on Alderney
- at Belfast
- at Berehaven
- on the Bristol Channel
- at Chatham
- at the Clyde
- at Cork
- at Dover
- on the Isle of Wight
- at Milford Haven
- in East Anglia and on the North Thames
- in north east England
- at Plymouth
- in Portland Harbor
- at Portsmouth
- on Lough Swilly
- on the south coast of England (unless previously mentioned)
- at Tenby
Individual evidence
- ^ D. Brown: Palmerston and Anglo-French Relations, 1846-1865 in Diplomacy & Statecraft . Issue 17 (2006). Issue 4. pp. 675-692.
- ^ S. King-Hall: A Defense Debate Ninety Years Ago in Parliamentary Affairs . Issue 2. Volume V. January 1, 1951. pp. 297-304.
- ↑ Peter Hicks: 'Palmerston's Follies': a reply to the French 'threat' . Napoleon.org. Retrieved October 7, 2016.
- ↑ Fort Nelson History . In: Royal Armories . Retrieved October 7, 2016.
