Alderney is one of the Channel Islands, little bits of British territory off the French coast. Alderney boasts one town and a bunch of old fortifications. These include an Elizabethan fort (above),
a substantial set of forts and batteries built in the 1800s,
and several concrete blockhouses built by the Nazis.
All of which was probably a waste of time, because most experts who have looked at the place have deemed it fundamentally indefesible:
The island was never able to effectively defend itself and survived attack mainly from being too poor and insignificant to be worth the expense of raiding.
Gladstone dismissed the 19th-century plan of fortification as
a monument of human folly, useless to us...but perhaps not absolutely useless to a possible enemy, with whom we may at some period have to deal and who may possibly be able to extract some profit in the way of shelter and accommodation from the ruins
The WW II Allies simply ignored the place, leaving its very hungry defenders to surrender at the end of the war.
But besides all those well documented forts, there is this thing, known as The Nunnery. What is it?
Well, it looks like a Roman fort, albeit with a few later additions. The stonework seems Roman, and the shape closely resembled the four Roman "signal stations" along the east coast of Yorkshire. But the walls of those signal stations survive to about knee height. Who ever heard of a Roman fort with standing walls 18 feet high?
Debate about the site therefore raged for more than 150 years.
Excavations carried out in 2008 to 2011 finally nailed the site's origin: Roman artifacts found around the foundation confirm that it is indeed a Roman fort. It now bills itself the best preserved Roman fort in Britain.
Elizabethan records describe a tall tower standing in the center of the fort, but that disappeared before any archaeologist got a good look at it. But they did find the foundations, which showed that this tower was pretty big, leading them to reconstruct it like this. I don't know how could you tell from the foundations that the walls went straight up, rather than some sort of pyramid? But anyway this is the official interpetation.
I learned about this from a sort of New Year's best wishes email I received from a regular reader of this blog who lives in Alderney. I loved learning about Alderney, and I love knowing that I have readers around the world.
