Ben Salter's photos with the keyword: Napoleonic

Brean Down Fort forms part of a line of defences, known as Palmerston Forts, built across the channel to protect the approaches to Bristol and Cardiff. It was fortified following a visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to France, where they had been concerned at the strength of the French Navy. To the bottom right of this picture are the concrete bases of the Nissan Huts once used to house troops during WW2

Brean Down Fort was approached over a dry moat on the landward side through iron gates. The barrack quarters on the left as you approach the fort could hold 50 men while the officers' quarters and admin offices were to the right. There were three main gun positions - 3 guns faced west, 3 faced north west and one faced north.

The entrance to a large, underground, main gunpowder magazine, 15 feet by 18 feet by 20 feet high!

One of seven 7-inch Rifled Muzzle-Loading Cannons, which were built at Woolwich was mounted here in 1877, and each weighed 7 tons and had a 30lb charge of gunpowder able to fire a 112lb Palliser shot at 1,560 feet per second. This could pierce 8 inches of armour at 1,000 yards.

Brean Down seemed an ideal testing site for secret weapons. A rail track was built and the so-called bomb was mounted on a six hundredweight trolley propelled at 200mph along a caterpillar track by 12 powerful rockets. The aim was to propel the trolley at high speed into buffers. The impact would fling the bomb far out to sea. But the whole lot - trolley, buffers and all - actually went flying off into the Channel, then did a sharp right and came back inland into a local farmer's chicken run!

The steps down into one of many underground ammunition storage rooms. At 5am on July 6, 1900 the fort was rocked by a huge explosion causing the death of one soldier - Gunner Haines - who had fired his carbine down the shaft of a ventilator into No. 3 magazine, beneath the western gun positions. Huge damage was done - with the wall seperating the fort from the moat on the south west corner being demolished and wreckage thrown up to 200 yards. No-one knew why the gunner had blown up the fort. But it was a fatal blow as it was quickly closed down and the cannons hauled away by traction engines.