He is a local historical
enthusiast. He brought me on a walk
along the harbour and told me a few facts about the area.
There are three lump forts just
off the coast of Portsmouth. They are
military (or were) but were never really used for defense. They were built in the 1800’s for defense
against the French but the French never attacked. There are a lot of them dotted along the
south coast.
Brian said, of the ones off the
coast of Portsmouth, that one is a restaurant/venue, one is privately owned and
the other is still military and apparently used by the MI5 (which I was
delighted about).
There is a tower on Gosport (this
is a town just west of Portsmouth, it is a peninsula, you take the ferry there
in about ten minutes or you drive the long way round, I think that takes about
45 minutes). It is a diving tower
operated by the navy. Naval divers need
to be able to emerge from the level of water in the tower before it is
permissible for them to go down in a submarine.
This structure is interesting to me; there is so much water around yet
this large tower has been constructed to contain a tall-standing tube of
water. Brian said that during World War
II (it may have been I, I need to check) the Germans used this tower as a
marker to navigate east to Portsmouth (where the naval dockyard was). The British military built a cardboard
replica of this tower at the furthest point of the peninsula to deter the enemy
bombers. I wonder if the replica was
life-size, I assume it was, or almost at least.
And I wonder if it still exists. I
will try to find information on this!
Diving tower on Gosport
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