Photowalk 17 - Fort Brockhurst (Inside At Last!)

English Heritage have finally decided to open Fort Brockhurst on the second Saturday of every month during the Summer, so I talked my son, Oliver, into coming with me, I grabbed my camera and headed on over to this Victorian Fortification about a quarter of a mile from my front door....

No video this time I'm afraid - I was with my boy, so everything was done a bit quickly, but I did manage to squeeze in a few Pano's. Fort Brockhurst is part of the defences built in the 1860's to protect Portsmouth Harbour, the home of the Royal Navy and defender of the Empire from an aggressive France. (Again.) First, a little context.

In the second half of the 19th Century, Parliament realised that if the threat of a French Invasion was materialised, the probable landing point would be along the large parts of undefended coast-line, and that the Royal Navy Dockyards were terribly exposed from attack from behind. Modern artillery meant that the existing defences were too close - cannon could simply fire over the top of them, so the decision was made for a massive works of defensive Forts and positions.

Being the most important Royal Navy Dockyard, Portsmouth was surrounded by a ring of Forts, including several in the sea approaching the Harbour. Fort Brockhurst is part of the Advanced Gosport Line. Part of a row of forts reaching from the sea to Fareham Creek, each fort has interlocking lines of fire, making it very difficult for anyone to approach Gosport, set up guns, and shell the Dockyard.

The Forts are an unusual design - protected from the West with Earth Ramparts, and a Castle-Style Keep. The idea is that if the Ramparts were over-run, soldiers could retreat to the Keep, then fire across the Parade Ground, clearing the Ramparts, enabling a counter-attack to re-take the Ramparts.

If the whole Fort was over-run, the East-Side of the Fort is simple brick wall - so guns closer to Gosport could simply smash down the walls, and again clear the Fort of Enemy, so that it could be retaken.

Completed in the late 1860's, the Forts were rendered obsolete almost immediately. Newer guns had the range to fire over the defences and into the Dockyard, without the French having to take the Forts. Fort Brockhurst did however see action in WWII, when the Luftwaffe bombed a case-mate, causing superficial damage.

Check out my other Fort Brockhurst Photowalks on Flickr for exterior shots of the Ramparts and Moat.

If you're still here, these are some of my shots from the Photowalk (as usual, click on the images to go through to Flickr for the bigger sizes):

Panorama, stitched together automatically in Photoshop CS3 from about 5 shots. Polarizer used to even out the sky, then my usual adjustments in Photoshop. This was a hand-held Pano, so I turn on the grid on my view-finder, do a couple of practice sweeps lining the horizon against one of the horizontal lines, then snap away, doubling up about a third of the frame on each shot. Its also best to be in manual mode and expose for the middle of the pano, to avoid exposure changes. In this case I had to be quick, one pass, but if I had more time I'd do another, and take a pic of my hand before the start, and after the end, so I know which are the pano frames when I'm looking for them for editing.

This photo was taken in the court-yard at the centre of the keep. I was sitting on the ground, trying to get the gun and the sky in frame. With a few of these shots i felt they weren't that interesting, so a b&w and sepia treatment tends to focus attention on the details in the image rather than the colour. Disappointed that some of the cloud detail has blown out.

WaHey! An action shot! It's also (I think) my first "angled shot", I tend to be very tied to my horizontals and verticals. I wanted to express the difficulty an enemy soldier would have in crossing the exposed Parade Ground to attack the Keep (there's also the small matter of a moat to cross too). The zoom blur was added in Photoshop.

Another of my "go to" shots - the flower macro with an interesting background. I was a bit far away from the flower to get the background to be really out of focus, and the highlights on the petals blew-out, so I went for an extreme-contrast sort of idea.

This is actually a pano made of two landscape orientated shots. I didn't like the colour version, so gave it a sepia treatment. Couldn't do much with the Sun blowing out the details in the top-left, and post processing had left some odd effects in the sky, definitely worth a re-working at a later date.

A Haxo-Casemate, or covered gun-emplacement. I had to do a Pano for this, I couldn't get back far enough to get the gun in one shot. I would have preferred a HDR treatment, but my son was getting bored, so it was on to the next!

C'est Moi! Taken by my son, he'll be better than me soon!

A view through one of the Gun-Ports high on the Ramparts, looking down on a WWII era Pill Box. Makes you wonder why they built a tiny concrete box when they had a hulking great Fort, offering miles more protection 100 yards away....

A final Pano. I guess one of the drawbacks of owning a bridge type camera is the inability to fix a really wide-angle lens on it (you can't change the lens on my S5700), but Photoshop CS3 does a pretty good job of stitching it all together! Handheld, this maybe my favourite shot of the day.

My Photowalk around the insides of Fort Brockhurst was great - I will definitely come back in a months time a try and get some shots inside the Keep and the Caponiers, but I'll need to use my tripod, and I just didn't have the time, Oliver was keen to keep moving and see the different parts of the Fort.

Thanks, see you on Flickr, Rob.

Comments

[andrew jones]

Brilliant pictures!! Love the action shot very impressive.

[Rob_Nunn]

Thank you, nice site of yours by the way, I look forward to seeing more aviation pics, love those jets!