Defence of the Realm:             

 

     
                                       Landport C.1910  pic courtesy of Carlos Nicolas 
            

One of Gibraltar’s most prominent yet perhaps least well known heritage assets has recently been brought back from the dead; well at least from the very edge of oblivion. Landport Ditch, virtually a dustbin for the latter years of the last century, has been given a new lease of life in this one. To visitors and grateful residents alike, its present incarnation as a car park disguises the fact that it once formed an integral part of the Grand Battery defensive system.

 The south side of Landport ditch is contained by the curtain wall, or scarp, which, with  its fifteen embrasures for great guns, is a forbidding obstacle in itself. There can be little doubt that when the wartime concrete is removed and the embrasures are once again equipped with cannon it will present a formidable spectacle.

 The north side of the ditch is formed by a wall, usually called a counterscarp, beyond which an inclined sand slope or glacis, ran down towards Bayside. Thus an approaching enemy had to claw his way up the sloping glacis - whilst being shot at from the Grand Battery - only to find he then has to descend into the ditch before he can approach the curtain wall. His only direct access to the curtain wall was via the bridge, whose approach was well covered by Kings Lines and Hesse’s and whose final protection was the drawbridge at the heavily defended Landport Gate.

 Most of us would have thought this a fairly adequate system of defence and yet our antecedents took it a couple of stages further. On some parts of the walls we can see the last vestige of what must once have been a fine colony of barnacles, indicating that at one time the ditch was flooded with seawater. In the 17^th and 18th centuries a cunette, - a deep channel filled with water - was typical of many defensive ditches. Here, the barnacle evidence suggests that at some time(s) the whole of Landport ditch may have been flooded.

 Yet still that was not enough; the defences continued with a countermine beneath the glacis. In the counterscarp there are two entrances to galleries (tunnels), driving deep inside the glacis slope. At the end of each gallery we find branches running left and right forming a tee, along which barrels of explosives would be placed, so that the whole slope could be exploded beneath the feet of a massed assault, should it be necessary. Clearly, it was not; as we still have the mines today and indeed the defenders found benefits that they had not, perhaps, expected.

            Mines depicted in yellow on Col.Oliver D’Harcourt’s 1704 exact map of the fortress.

The mines would have acted as soughs, draining the sand slopes above and collecting significant amounts of water during the winter. However, this impediment to their primary purpose was turned to good use. By directing the water into an enormous cistern, still within the glacis, the engineers managed to turn a curse into a blessing. Just who those engineers were we shall probably never know, but the sentries who patiently guarded the mines have left their marks in graffiti as clear now as it was when first cut.

 Their inscriptions remained for WW2 soldiers to see when the cistern was used as an air raid shelter and for the few Gibraltarians who remember the west mine entrance being used as a garage, to house the famous bren-gun carrier often seen in pictures of the frontier gates.  Although the east mine is now closed, the semi-derelict west mine is a further testament to the ingenuity and artifice of fortress builders.

     

           

        First published at Gibraltar Magazine, February 2004.        Paul Hodkinson.