Someone once asked me why I write posts about the navy when my blog and book were entitled Nothe Fort and Beyond. ‘Beyond’ maybe gives a clue because the Victorian fortifications weren’t built as a stand alone defence. They were not only designed to protect our south coast from invasion but to protect the naval…
Tag: Portland
Nothe Fortifications and the 18th corps Royal Engineers; Military history of Weymouth.
The pre 1850’s Nothe headland was a very different place to the one we know nowadays, but it was still very popular with both locals and the visiting elite. Joseph Russell Tompkins in an article from the Dorset Year Book of 1923 builds a wonderful early Victorian image of this headland; ‘the Nothe was quite free…
WEYMOUTH DURING WWI; BRITISH ARMY HUMOUR 1915
Like most institutions, the army developed their own sense of humour. During one of my night time rummages through the online auction sites I came across this little cracker from WWI and my finger just inadvertently hit the ‘buy’ button. It is a tongue in cheek magazine created by those soldiers stationed in the Weymouth…
1867; Danger Lurks in Portland Quarries.
Originally posted on VICTORIAN TALES FROM WEYMOUTH AND PORTLAND:
The quarries on Portland are world renown. They are of a strange type of brutal beauty, the glare from the white stone is blinding in the bright sunshine, the heat reflects mercilessly from the calcified remains that makes up the huge slabs that tumble and totter precariously…
The Runaway Engine.
This is the excerpt for your very first post.
NOTHE FORT AND BEYOND... 