MARTELLO TOWERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 17, 21 January 1933, Page 7 (Supplement)

MARTELLO TOWERS.

Five Martello towers on the Essex, Suffolk, Kent, and Sussex coasts are foxsale. Tliey are among the last, if they are not the last, towers remaining for disposal. It was at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that, to ease national fears of an invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Government began to build a line' of coastal towers from Beacliy Head to Hytlic, and continued them intermittently elsewhere. The type chosen was similar to the tower on Cape Mortella, in Corsica— hence the name Mortella, somewhat popularised —which offered a wonderful resistance, with a garrison of only 33 men, against a combined sea and land attack by British forces. Over £250,000 was spent in building the Martello towers between Brighton and Hythc. After the danger of an invasion by the French was over the towers served as stations for the coastguard. Their days of usefulness soon passed. In modern times some towers have disappeared completely; others form homesteads to miniature small holdings; still others have been converted into summer residences.