Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Day 10.105: Fort Knox

As Exile #2 mentioned, after a fairly lazy start to Saturday, we took a small detour to visit Fort Knox on our way back from our mini break. It's an extraordinary place - built in the mid 19th century to repel a largely by-then imagined threat from the British, it never saw battle and is - perhaps as a result - very well preserved.

We spent a very enjoyable couple of hours exploring outside:


Exile #4 is investigating one of the "hot shot furnace" designed to heat cannonballs so that they would set fire to ships that they hit (alas, in keeping with the theme of the fort, the cannons that were eventually installed were of a different bore - so these furnaces could not have been used in any case).

And also inside:


The passageways on various levels around the central courtyard were quite amazing spaces. We discovered that it took eight people to fire one of the cannons and that "A" battery is not a misuse of quotes but we were not sure until we discovered the "B" battery.

2 comments:

  1. Did they have any smaller cannons called "AA" or even "AAA" battery? :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You should see the "PP3" battery - unfortunately you have to stand in front of the cannons to fire them which proved rather impractical.

      Delete

Anonymous comments allowed - Name (with optional URL) preferred.