Tregantle Fort
Tregantle Fort is a former fort in the county of Cornwall in Great Britain . The former fort, protected as a Grade II cultural monument and a Scheduled Monument , is located about two kilometers southwest of the village of Antony on the Rame peninsula on a 110 m high hill above Whitesand Bay on the English Channel .
history
The fort was designed in 1858 on the recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Defense of the United Kingdom as part of the new fort belt around Plymouth and built until 1865. As part of the Western Defense , together with Polhawn Fort and Scraesdon Fort , it was supposed to prevent hostile landings on the Rame Peninsula, from where the Devonport naval base could have been shot across the Hamoaze . However, the fort was never engaged in combat.
The main armament was to consist of 35 smooth-barreled 32-pounder breech-loading guns, but these were never fully installed. In 1893 the equipment consisted of 5 7-inch breech-loading guns and 19 64-pounder muzzle-loading cannons. The garrison initially consisted of a 50-man coastal artillery unit . After just a few years, the facility was considered obsolete, so that the crew was reduced to just six gunners. As a replacement for the outdated fortress, the Tregantle Down High Angle Battery , a gun emplacement of four 9-inch muzzle-loading guns, was built to the east from 1888 to 1894 . The guns could be used as high-speed guns with a maximum barrel elevation of 70 degrees so that the projectiles could penetrate the armored decks of ships. The range from the positions 100 m above sea level was up to 10,000 m. The four rotating guns were set up in two pairs on concrete beds. Magazines and workshops were located between the two pairs of guns. The nearby old fort served as accommodation for the gun crews.
For the construction of the new coastal artillery position, a jetty called Walker Quay was built on the Lynher River, as well as a military railway to the new gun position, on which the 12-ton guns were transported. The railway line was completed in 1893, but ten years later the heavy artillery was dismantled and the railway line was shut down and finally dismantled.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Tregantle Fort served as the headquarters for an infantry battalion and as a training facility for handguns. After the First World War, the former fortress was abandoned, but from 1938 it was used again as a training area for the Territorial Army for air defense , fire fighting and rescue operations. At the beginning of the Second World War, it served as a training area for defense against poisonous gases , until US troops were housed in the former fortress in preparation for the invasion of Normandy in 1942 . After 1945 the facility was returned to the British Army, and the Royal Corps of Transport is currently using the facility.
The steep slopes below the fort, sloping towards the sea, are used as shooting ranges by the HMS Raleigh training center in Torpoint .
investment
The fort's plan is an irregular hexagon. The terrain south of the fortress slopes steeply to the sea, on the other sides the fortress is surrounded by a moat. The outer walls of the fortress are made of coarse limestone, the gatehouse with a vaulted passage is in the southeast. The trench could be defended with three caponiers in the west and north. On the east wall there is a two-storey cavalier , semicircular towards the courtyard side , which is also protected from the courtyard by a ditch and served as the main warehouse. The courtyard consists of two levels, the higher northern part served as the installation area for the artillery, the lower southern part contained the barracks for a garrison of up to 1000 soldiers.
Web links
- The National Heritage List for England: Tregantle Fort
- Victorian Forts: Fort Tregantle (PDF, 315 KB)
- Plymouth Western Defenses
Individual evidence
- ^ Tregantle Down High Angle Battery. (PDF; 588 KB) Retrieved June 11, 2013 .
- ^ Tregantle Military Railway. Retrieved June 11, 2013 .
Coordinates: 50 ° 21'25.5 " N , 4 ° 16'12.2" W.