Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Tower of strength

In the Napoleonic era, Britain feared a French invasion and between 1796 and 1815, a string of 103 towers were built along England’s south and east coasts, to house soldiers and guns to help protect the country from attackers. These fortified structures were known as Martello towers, a name that derives from a defensive tower on Punta Mortella in Corsica – the name of the original got misspelled and the misspelling stuck.* Martello Towers are generally elliptical in plan and brick built. The total height was 33 feet and diameters varied from 45 to 55 feet. The walls were up to 13 feet thick and it has been estimated that around 700,000 bricks were used in each tower. One or more cannon were mounted on a rotating platform on the roof. The two floors below provided accommodation for soldiers and stores.

I was reminded of all this the other day when in Aldeburgh. I’d not visited its Martello tower, the most northerly of the British network, since my first visit to the town, years ago. decided to walk south along the beach to the tower, which when it was built was not thought of as being in Aldeburgh at all, but in the lost village of Slaughden, which later succumbed to the coastal erosion that is such a challenge to life on many parts of the East Anglian coast. I wanted to have a look at the tower again because it’s unique in England’s series of such towers, being built on a quatrefoil (or four-leaf clover) plan.¶ This gives it a different look from the other towers and also allows a different set-up for the guns on the roof – there were at first two, then four guns, one for each ‘lobe’ of the quatrefoil. Inside, the upper floor provided accommodation (for eight soldiers, five NCOs and a commanding officer), while the lower floor was for stores containing food, fuel, and gunpowder, the latter kept on the landward side and reached from a separate stair.

When, in the 1930s, the Ministry of Defence decided the tower no longer had any military use, they sold it to private owners who converted it to a dwelling by adding a studio on top. This, however, fell out of use and both the addition and the tower deteriorated. The Landmark Trust acquired the tower in 1971 and converted it for use as holiday accommodation. The Trust have made their usual good job of restoring the building carefully and fitting it out to provide a comfortable (if, on this occasion, unconventional) holiday let.† Whether you want to stay in it, or just admire it from the outside, it’s an impressive testament to the efforts of both the original builders and those who saved it from its slide into decay.

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* The Corsican tower, manned with a garrison of 38 and just three guns, withstood an attack by two British naval ships (with a total of 106 guns). The British clearly thought they could learn something from this.

¶ This larger and more complex plan suggests that the structure may contain at least one million bricks.

† I am indebted to the Landmark Trust’s website for information about the tower’s history.

Hepple, Northumberland

Poor man’s tower

The pele tower of the kind featured in my previous post was not the only kind of fortified dwelling typical of the border country. There was also the bastle, or bastle house, a type of fortified farmhouse. Bastles (the name derives from the French bastille) usually had two (or sometimes three) storeys. The farmer’s livestock (or at least, the most valuable animals) occupied the ground floor. Above this were the owner’s living quarters, separated from the room below by either a wooden or stone-vaulted ceiling. The walls were usually thick (about a metre) and there were only a few small windows. This simple arrangement has led to some dubbing the bastle the ‘poor man’s tower’, though it is not strictly a tower at all. More than one thousand bastles were built in the border region between 1500 and 1700.

Many bastles fell into disuse after life got easier with the reduction in border raids during the 17th century. Some fell into ruin, some were adapted to make more comfortable dwellings; their solid construction has ensured that they survive well. Woodhouses Bastle, near the village of Hepple, has been preserved in something close to its original form. It’s a simple stone building that would be easy for the casual passer-by to mistake for a barn. The lower room is stone-vaulted, reducing the risk of the bastle being successfully attacked using fire. It sits on a hillside, commanding a broad view from three sides through tiny windows. The largest window on the side in my photograph is protected by bars

The building bears a date stone, carved with some initials and the date 1602. The initials include W.P., probably for the landowner, William Potte. The date may well be the year modifications were made or fortifications completed, since the building itself was probably put up in the 16th century. Soon after 1602, the Stuart king James VI and I set measures in progress to reduce the danger of border raiding. While a secure home remained a valuable asset in remote areas, the heyday of the fortified farmhouse would soon be coming to an end.

Elsdon, Northumberland

Refuge

During the centuries up to c. 1600, the borders of England and Scotland were subject to regular bouts of raiding. Gangs from either side would cross the border and launch plundering attacks on locals, stealing valuables (and especially livestock) or extorting money. This activity was known as reiving, and the border reivers were much feared. They were ruthless and violent, and potential victims did their best to protect their families, their belongings, and their animals. So life in this region was tough, especially in the 16th century when the attacks were at their height. After 1603, when James VI of Scotland also became ruler of England as James I, concerted efforts were made to reduce reiving and punish the gang leaders.

Meanwhile, one common defensive strategy among local landlords, lairds or clergy was to build a tower-house, known in this area as a pele tower. Pele towers had thick walls and few, small windows; access to the towers was difficult because their whole point was to keep people out. The ground floor chamber was often barrel vaulted in stone, to make the upper chamber more secure and to reduce the risk of fire. Another feature was an iron fire basket high up on the exterior, so that the residents could signal that they were being attacked.

Many pele towers survive on either side of the border. Most have been adapted, with the addition of larger windows and better access. Many are now part of another building, such as a larger house built by a later owner. This is the case with the pele tower at Elsdon, with its added big ground-floor window and large adjoining house. It was built as a vicar’s pele in the early-15th century and has walls that are 2.6 m thick and a vaulted ceiling to the ground floor.* Originally it had four storeys, although today there are just three. In the 1820s the current two-storey house was built beside the tower and the enlarged building remained as the local rectory until 1960. The extended building stands as a marker of how the homes of the clergy (and indeed many other members of the middle and upper classes) changed over the centuries between the 15th and the 19th century, from a few small, dark rooms to a comfortable house with plenty of light and many fireplaces. Today the building is in private ownership and is not open to the public, although a notice on the garden wall invites visitors to step a couple of paces inside the gate to see the exterior of the tower.

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* Much of the surviving stonework, however, may come from a 16th-century rebuilding.

Ilminster, Somerset

‘The war’

In 1940 long defensive lines were constructed running across southern England to hold up an enemy advance in the event of an invasion. These lines, made of barbed wire defences, tank traps, and thick-walled concrete pillboxes, were extensive, but they had weak points where access routes crossed them. One such point was at Ilminster in Somerset, where, in those days, the A303 passed through the middle of the town. Ilminster itself was therefore fortified, with a ring of barbed wire and tank traps, some earthworks, 17 pillboxes (each with a machine gun), and a heavy gun emplacement.  As well as the machine gunners, there would be riflemen dug in, and altogether about 400 people (up to half of them local home guard members) were needed to man this complex, defend Ilminster, and, so it was hoped, play their part in repelling the invading force.* Parts of this defensive line still exist. This pillbox is on a public footpath that once formed part of one of the long entrance drives to Dillington House, connecting the mansion to the town. The thick concrete has survived well, and the polygonal structure still looks fit for purpose. Eighty years’ growth of moss, plus some ivy, only help to camouflage the box.

When I was a boy in the 1950s and 1960s, local pillboxes in Gloucestershire were somewhere to play. We all knew they had been built ‘for the war’, but the reality, that, if we’d been boys 20 years earlier and things had gone differently, our own fathers, or, more likely, grandfathers, might have been risking their lives defending them, hardly impinged.† Seeing such boxes now (and experiencing briefly the temptation to ‘play’ with them in another way, imagining not the brutality of war but the origins of brutalist architecture) brings one up short, as I’ve been brought up short by reconstructions of the First World War trenches in Piccardy or by exploring the formidable defences put up in Czechoslovakia, to no avail, in the late 1930s in the hope of protecting the country from invasion by the Nazis. I hope I’ll never have to confront this brutality in person, and that neither my son nor my nieces will either. All politicians should look at such buildings, use their sometimes limited imaginations, and reflect.

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* Information panels on site tell the story of these defences. I’m indebted to them.

† Back then, c. 1960, memories of World War II were close for adults; everyone knew what you meant when you said ‘the war’.