Newport, Isle of Wight
Newport is a civil parish and the county town of the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England. The civil parish had a population of 23,957 at the time of the 2001 census, which rose to 25,496 at the 2011 census; the town lies to the north of the centre of the Island. It has a quay at the head of the navigable section of the River Medina, which flows northward to Cowes and the Solent. Mousterian remains, featuring tools made by Neanderthals at least 40,000 years ago, were found at Great Pan Farm in the 1970s. There are signs of Roman settlement in the area, known as Medina, including two known Roman villas, one of which, Newport Roman Villa, has been excavated and is open to the public. Information about the area resumes after the Norman Conquest; the first charter was granted in the late 12th century. In 1377 an invading French force burnt down much of the town while attempting to take Carisbrooke Castle under the command of Sir Hugh Tyrill. A group of Frenchmen were captured and killed buried in a tumulus nicknamed Noddies Hill, a "noddy" being medieval slang for a body.
This was corrupted to Nodehill, the present-day name for a part of central Newport – a name confusing to many as the area is flat. In 1648 Charles I and a group of Parliamentary Commissioners concluded the Treaty of Newport, an attempt at reaching a compromise in the Civil War, undermined by Charles's negotiations with the French and Scots to intervene on his behalf; the Treaty was repudiated by Oliver Cromwell upon returning from defeating the Scots at the Battle of Preston. This led to Charles's execution; the town had been incorporated as a borough in 1608. The town's position as an area of trade accessible to the sea meant it took over from nearby Carisbrooke as the main central settlement absorbing the latter as a suburb; the borough ceased to exist in 1974 when it was incorporated into the larger Borough of Medina, itself superseded in 1995 by a single unitary authority covering the whole of the Isle of Wight. The Drill hall in Newport opened as the headquarters of the Isle of Wight Rifle Volunteers in 1860.
Newport since the 1960s has acquired new shopping facilities, a pedestrianised central square, through road traffic redirected off many of the narrow streets. Newport Quay has been redeveloped with art galleries such as the Quay Arts Centre and new flats converted from old warehouses; the Queen Victoria Memorial was designed by local architect Percy Stone. Geographically located in the centre of the Island at 50.701°N, 1.2883°W, Newport is the principal town in the Isle of Wight, to which there are transport connections from all the island's major towns. It is the island's main shopping location for public services; the main A3020 and A3054 roads converge as Medina Way between the busy roundabouts at Coppins Bridge and St Mary's Hospital. Newport railway station was the hub of the Island's rail network until the mid-20th century, but it closed in 1966 and the site is now occupied by the A3020 Medina Way dual carriageway; the nearest city to the town is Portsmouth, about 13 miles north-east on Portsea Island, adjoining the mainland.
More locally, the island's largest town, is to the north-east. The River Medina runs through Newport. North of its confluence with the Lukely Brook at the town's quay it becomes a navigable tidal estuary. Distance from surrounding settlements Cowes – 4.5 miles, 7 km East Cowes – 5 miles, 8 km Ryde – 7 miles, 11 km Shanklin – 9 miles, 15 km Sandown – 10 miles, 16 km Ventnor – 11 miles, 18 km Yarmouth, Isle of Wight – 10 miles, 16 km The town's suburb of Parkhurst is home to two prisons: the notorious Parkhurst Prison and Albany. Parkhurst and Albany were once among the few top-security prisons in the United Kingdom. Camp Hill was another prison in the area, but closed in 2013. Seaclose Park in Newport, on the east bank of the River Medina, has since 2002 been the location for the revived Isle of Wight Music Festival, held once a year. Newport is home to the Postal Museum the largest private collection of vintage postal equipment and post boxes in the world. Newport bus station is the town's central bus terminus and acts as the hub of the Southern Vectis network, with routes from across the Island terminating there.
St George's Park is the home of Newport Football Club, the most successful of the Island's football teams playing in the Wessex League. The stadium has a capacity of 3,000; the town is represented by Newport Cricket Club, which plays at Victoria recreational ground. Newport CC have two teams which compete in Harwoods Renault Divisions 1 and 2; the Isle of Wight County Cricket Ground is located on the outskirts of the town. The town of Newport and adjoining village of Carisbrooke together have seven primary schools, three secondary schools, a sixth-form campus, a further education college and two special schools; the primary schools located close to the town centre are Newport C of E Primary and Nine Acres Community Primary. Barton Primary is located on Pan estate, whilst Summerfields Primary is nearby on the Staplers estate, both to the east of the town. Hunnyhill Primary is situated on Forest Road to the north of the town, there are two primary schools in Carisbrooke: Carisbrooke C of E Primary on Wellington Road and St Thomas of Canterbury Catholic Primary in the High Street in the village centre.
The three secondary schools are Medina College and Christ the King College. Carisbrooke College is located on a large site on the outskirts of Carisbrooke village, whilst Christ the King is just down the road occupying two former middle school sites on
Bastion
A bastion or bulwark is a structure projecting outward from the curtain wall of a fortification, most angular in shape and positioned at the corners. The developed bastion consists of two faces and two flanks with fire from the flanks being able to protect the curtain wall and the adjacent bastions, it is one element in the style of fortification dominant from the mid 16th to mid 19th centuries. Bastion fortifications offered a greater degree of passive resistance and more scope for ranged defense in the age of gunpowder artillery compared with the medieval fortifications they replaced. By the middle of the 15th century, artillery pieces had become powerful enough to make the traditional medieval round tower and curtain wall obsolete; this was exemplified by the campaigns of Charles VII of France who reduced the towns and castles held by the English during the latter stages of the Hundred Years War, by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the large cannon of the Turkish army. During the Eighty Years War Dutch military engineers developed the concepts further lengthening the faces and shortening the curtain walls of the bastions.
The resulting construction was called a bolwerk. To augment this change they placed v-shaped outworks known as ravelins in front of the bastions and curtain walls to protect them from direct artillery fire; these ideas were further developed and incorporated into the trace italienne forts by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, that remained in use during the Napoleonic Wars. Bastions differ from medieval towers in a number of respects. Bastions are lower than towers and are of similar height to the adjacent curtain wall; the height of towers, although making them difficult to scale made them easy for artillery to destroy. A bastion would have a ditch in front, the opposite side of which would be built up above the natural level slope away gradually; this glacis shielded most of the bastion from the attacker's cannon while the distance from the base of the ditch to the top of the bastion meant it was still difficult to scale. In contrast to typical late medieval towers, bastions were flat sided rather than curved.
This eliminated dead ground making it possible for the defenders to fire upon any point directly in front of the bastion. Bastions cover a larger area than most towers; this allows more cannons to be provided enough space for the crews to operate them. Surviving examples of bastions are faced with masonry. Unlike the wall of a tower this was just a retaining wall; the top of the bastion was exposed to enemy fire, would not be faced with masonry as cannonballs hitting the surface would scatter lethal stone shards among the defenders. If a bastion was stormed, it could provide the attackers with a stronghold from which to launch further attacks; some bastion designs attempted to minimise this problem. This could be achieved by the use of retrenchments in which a trench was dug across the rear of the bastion, isolating it from the main rampart. Various kinds of bastions have been used throughout history. Solid bastions are those that are filled up and have the ground with the height of the rampart, without any empty space towards the centre.
Void or hollow bastions are those that have a rampart, or parapet, only around their flanks and faces, so that a void space is left towards the centre. The ground is so low, that if the rampart is taken, no retrenchment can be made in the centre, but what will lie under the fire of the besieged. A flat bastion is one built in the middle of a curtain, or enclosed court, when the court is too large to be defended by the bastions at its extremes. A cut bastion is that, it was sometimes called bastion with a tenaille. Such bastions were used; the term cut bastion is used for one, cut off from the place by some ditch. A composed bastion is when the two sides of the interior polygon are unequal, which makes the gorges unequal. A regular bastion is that which has proportionate faces and gorges. A deformed or irregular bastion is one. A demi-bastion has flank. To fortify the angle of a place, too acute, they cut the point, place two demi-bastions, which make a tenaille, or re-entry angle, their chief use is before a crownwork.
A double bastion is that which on the plain of the great bastion has another bastion built higher, leaving 4–6 m between the parapet of the lower and the base of the higher. Semi-circular bastions were used in the 16th century, but fell out of favour because of the difficulty of concentrating the fire of guns distributed around a curve. Known as "half-moon" bastions. Circular bastions or roundels evolved in the 15th and early 16th centuries but were superseded by angled bastions. Bastille Battery tower Roundel Whitelaw, A. ed. The popular encyclopedia. P&G, pp. 50–54, ISBN 978-1-906394-07-3 Nossov, Konstantin. H. (19
Ancient Rome
In historiography, ancient Rome is Roman civilization from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, encompassing the Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic and Roman Empire until the fall of the western empire. The civilization began as an Italic settlement in the Italian Peninsula, conventionally founded in 753 BC, that grew into the city of Rome and which subsequently gave its name to the empire over which it ruled and to the widespread civilisation the empire developed; the Roman Empire expanded to become one of the largest empires in the ancient world, though still ruled from the city, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants and covering 5.0 million square kilometres at its height in AD 117. In its many centuries of existence, the Roman state evolved from a monarchy to a classical republic and to an autocratic semi-elective empire. Through conquest and assimilation, it dominated the North African coast and most of Western Europe, the Balkans and much of the Middle East.
It is grouped into classical antiquity together with ancient Greece, their similar cultures and societies are known as the Greco-Roman world. Ancient Roman civilisation has contributed to modern language, society, law, government, art, literature and engineering. Rome professionalised and expanded its military and created a system of government called res publica, the inspiration for modern republics such as the United States and France, it achieved impressive technological and architectural feats, such as the construction of an extensive system of aqueducts and roads, as well as the construction of large monuments and public facilities. The Punic Wars with Carthage were decisive in establishing Rome as a world power. In this series of wars Rome gained control of the strategic islands of Corsica and Sicily. By the end of the Republic, Rome had conquered the lands around the Mediterranean and beyond: its domain extended from the Atlantic to Arabia and from the mouth of the Rhine to North Africa.
The Roman Empire emerged with the dictatorship of Augustus Caesar. 721 years of Roman–Persian Wars started in 92 BC with their first war against Parthia. It would become the longest conflict in human history, have major lasting effects and consequences for both empires. Under Trajan, the Empire reached its territorial peak, it stretched from the entire Mediterranean Basin to the beaches of the North Sea in the north, to the shores of the Red and Caspian Seas in the East. Republican mores and traditions started to decline during the imperial period, with civil wars becoming a prelude common to the rise of a new emperor. Splinter states, such as the Palmyrene Empire, would temporarily divide the Empire during the crisis of the 3rd century. Plagued by internal instability and attacked by various migrating peoples, the western part of the empire broke up into independent "barbarian" kingdoms in the 5th century; this splintering is a landmark historians use to divide the ancient period of universal history from the pre-medieval "Dark Ages" of Europe.
The eastern part of the empire endured through the 5th century and remained a power throughout the "Dark Ages" and medieval times until its fall in 1453 AD. Although the citizens of the empire made no distinction, the empire is most referred to as the "Byzantine Empire" by modern historians during the Middle Ages to differentiate between the state of antiquity and the nation it grew into. According to the founding myth of Rome, the city was founded on 21 April 753 BC on the banks of the river Tiber in central Italy, by the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who descended from the Trojan prince Aeneas, who were grandsons of the Latin King Numitor of Alba Longa. King Numitor was deposed by his brother, while Numitor's daughter, Rhea Silvia, gave birth to the twins. Since Rhea Silvia had been raped and impregnated by Mars, the Roman god of war, the twins were considered half-divine; the new king, feared Romulus and Remus would take back the throne, so he ordered them to be drowned. A she-wolf saved and raised them, when they were old enough, they returned the throne of Alba Longa to Numitor.
The twins founded their own city, but Romulus killed Remus in a quarrel over the location of the Roman Kingdom, though some sources state the quarrel was about, going to rule or give his name to the city. Romulus became the source of the city's name. In order to attract people to the city, Rome became a sanctuary for the indigent and unwanted; this caused a problem, in that Rome was bereft of women. Romulus visited neighboring towns and tribes and attempted to secure marriage rights, but as Rome was so full of undesirables he was refused. Legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins with the Sabines. Another legend, recorded by Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, says that Prince Aeneas led a group of Trojans on a sea voyage to found a new Troy, since the original was destroyed at the end of the Trojan War. After a long time in rough seas, they landed on the banks of the Tiber River. Not long after they landed, the men wanted to take to the sea again, but the women who were traveling with them did not want to leave.
One woman, named Roma, suggested that the women burn the ships out at sea to prevent their leaving
Church of St Nicholas in Castro, Carisbrooke
The Church of St Nicholas in Castro, Carisbrooke is a parish church in the Church of England located in Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight. The church is the chapel of Carisbrooke Castle; the chapel is located next to the main gate of the castle. In 1904 the chapel of St Nicholas in the castle was reopened and re-consecrated, having been rebuilt as a national memorial of King Charles I; the chapel is home to the Isle of Wight County War Memorial, designed by local architect, Percy Stone. The church is grouped with Carisbrooke; the church has a two manual organ dating from 1908 by Bevington. A specification of the organ can be found on the National Pipe Organ Register. Media related to Carisbrooke Castle chapel at Wikimedia Commons
Edward I of England
Edward I known as Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. Before his accession to the throne, he was referred to as The Lord Edward; the first son of Henry III, Edward was involved early in the political intrigues of his father's reign, which included an outright rebellion by the English barons. In 1259, he sided with a baronial reform movement, supporting the Provisions of Oxford. After reconciliation with his father, however, he remained loyal throughout the subsequent armed conflict, known as the Second Barons' War. After the Battle of Lewes, Edward was hostage to the rebellious barons, but escaped after a few months and joined the fight against Simon de Montfort. Montfort was defeated at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, within two years the rebellion was extinguished. With England pacified, Edward joined the Ninth Crusade to the Holy Land; the crusade accomplished little, Edward was on his way home in 1272 when he was informed that his father had died.
Making a slow return, he was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 19 August. He spent much of his reign reforming common law. Through an extensive legal inquiry, Edward investigated the tenure of various feudal liberties, while the law was reformed through a series of statutes regulating criminal and property law. However, Edward's attention was drawn towards military affairs. After suppressing a minor rebellion in Wales in 1276–77, Edward responded to a second rebellion in 1282–83 with a full-scale war of conquest. After a successful campaign, Edward subjected Wales to English rule, built a series of castles and towns in the countryside and settled them with English people. Next, his efforts were directed towards Scotland. Invited to arbitrate a succession dispute, Edward claimed feudal suzerainty over the kingdom; the war that followed continued after Edward's death though the English seemed victorious at several points. Edward I found himself at war with France after the French king Philip IV had confiscated the duchy of Aquitaine, which until had been held in personal union with the Kingdom of England.
Although Edward recovered his duchy, this conflict relieved English military pressure against Scotland. At the same time there were problems at home. In the mid-1290s, extensive military campaigns required high levels of taxation, Edward met with both lay and ecclesiastical opposition; these crises were averted, but issues remained unsettled. When the King died in 1307, he left to his son Edward II an ongoing war with Scotland and many financial and political problems. Edward I was a tall man for his era, hence the nickname "Longshanks", he was temperamental, this, along with his height, made him an intimidating man, he instilled fear in his contemporaries. He held the respect of his subjects for the way he embodied the medieval ideal of kingship, as a soldier, an administrator and a man of faith. Modern historians are divided on their assessment of Edward I: while some have praised him for his contribution to the law and administration, others have criticised him for his uncompromising attitude towards his nobility.
Edward I is credited with many accomplishments during his reign, including restoring royal authority after the reign of Henry III, establishing Parliament as a permanent institution and thereby a functional system for raising taxes, reforming the law through statutes. At the same time, he is often criticised for other actions, such as his brutal conduct towards the Welsh and Scots, issuing the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, by which the Jews were expelled from England; the Edict remained in effect for the rest of the Middle Ages, it was over 350 years until it was formally overturned under Oliver Cromwell in 1657. Edward was born at the Palace of Westminster on the night of 17–18 June 1239, to King Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. Edward is an Anglo-Saxon name, was not given among the aristocracy of England after the Norman conquest, but Henry was devoted to the veneration of Edward the Confessor, decided to name his firstborn son after the saint. Among his childhood friends was his cousin Henry of Almain, son of King Henry's brother Richard of Cornwall.
Henry of Almain would remain a close companion of the prince, both through the civil war that followed, during the crusade. Edward was in the care of Hugh Giffard – father of the future Chancellor Godfrey Giffard – until Bartholomew Pecche took over at Giffard's death in 1246. There were concerns about Edward's health as a child, he fell ill in 1246, 1247, 1251. Nonetheless, he became an imposing man; the historian Michael Prestwich states that his "long arms gave him an advantage as a swordsman, long thighs one as a horseman. In youth, his curly hair was blond, his speech, despite a lisp, was said to be persuasive."In 1254, English fears of a Castilian invasion of the English province of Gascony induced Edward's father to arrange a politically expedient marriage between his fifteen-year-old son and thirteen-year-old Eleanor, the half-sister of King Alfonso X of Castile. Eleanor and Edward were married on 1 November 1254 in the Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas in Castile; as part of the marriage agreement, the young prince received grants of land worth 15,000 marks a year.
Although the endowments King Henry made were sizeable, they offered Edwa
English Heritage
English Heritage is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments and places. These include medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses; the charity states that it uses these properties to ‘bring the story of England to life for over 10 million people each year’. Within its portfolio are Stonehenge, Dover Castle, Tintagel Castle and the best preserved parts of Hadrian's Wall. English Heritage manages the London Blue Plaque scheme, which links influential historical figures to particular buildings; when formed in 1983, English Heritage was the operating name of an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government titled the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, that ran the national system of heritage protection and managed a range of historic properties. It was created to combine the roles of existing bodies that had emerged from a long period of state involvement in heritage protection. In 1999 the organisation merged with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and the National Monuments Record, bringing together resources for the identification and survey of England's historic environment.
On 1 April 2015, English Heritage was divided into two parts: Historic England, which inherited the statutory and protection functions of the old organisation, the new English Heritage Trust, a charity that would operate the historic properties, which took on the English Heritage operating name and logo. The British government gave the new charity an £80 million grant to help establish it as an independent trust, although the historic properties remained in the ownership of the state. Over the centuries, what is now called'Heritage' has been the responsibility of a series of state departments. There was the'Kings Works' after the Norman Conquest. Responsibility subsequently transferred to the Ministry of Public Building and Works to the Department of the Environment and now the Department for Culture and Sport; the state's legal responsibility for the historic environment goes back to the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882. Central government subsequently developed several systems of heritage protection for different types of'assets', introducing listing for buildings after WW2 and conservation areas in the 1960s.
In 1983 Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine gave national responsibility for the historic environment to a semi‑autonomous agency to operate under ministerial guidelines and to government policy. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission was formed under the terms of the National Heritage Act 1983 on 1 April 1984; the 1983 Act dissolved the bodies that had provided independent advice – the Ancient Monuments Board for England and the Historic Buildings Council for England and incorporated these functions in the new body. Soon after, the commission gained the operating name of English Heritage by its first Chairman, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. A national register of historic parks and gardens, was set up in 1984, a register for historic battlefields was created in March 1995.'Registration' is a material consideration in the planning process. In April 1999 English Heritage merged with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and the National Monuments Record, bringing together resources for the identification and survey of England's historic environment.
By adoption this included responsibility for the national record of archaeological sites from the Ordnance Survey. These, together with other nationally important external acquisitions, meant that English Heritage was one of the largest publicly accessible archives in the UK: 2.53 million records are available online, including more than 426,000 images. In 2010–2011 it recorded 4.3 million unique online user sessions and over 110,000 people visited NMR exhibitions held around the country in 2009/10. In 2012 the section responsible for archive collections was renamed the English Heritage Archive; as a result of the National Heritage Act 2002, English Heritage acquired administrative responsibility for historic wrecks and submerged landscapes within 12 miles of the English coast. The administration of the listed building system was transferred from DCMS to English Heritage in 2006. However, actual listing decisions still remained the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Culture and Sport, required by the Planning Act 1990 to approve a list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest.
Following the Public Bodies Reform in 2010, English Heritage was confirmed as the government's statutory adviser on the historic environment, the largest source of non-lottery grant funding for heritage assets. It was retained on grounds of "performing a technical function which should remain independent from Government"; however the department suffered from budget cuts during the recession of the 2010s resulting in a repairs deficit of £100 million. In June 2013 the British Government announced plans to provide an £80 million grant to enable English Heritage to become a self-financing charity; the national portfolio of historic properties remain in public ownership, but the new English Heritage will be licensed to manage them. The change occu
Bastion fort
A bastion fort or trace italienne, is a fortification in a style that evolved during the early modern period of gunpowder when the cannon came to dominate the battlefield. It was first seen in the mid-15th century in Italy; some types when combined with ravelins and other outworks, resembled the related star fort of the same era. The design of the fort is a pentagon or hexagon with bastions at the corners of the walls; these outcroppings eliminated protected blind spots, called "dead zones", allowed fire along the curtain from positions protected from direct fire. Many bastion forts feature cavaliers, which are raised secondary structures based inside the primary structure, their predecessors, medieval fortresses, were placed on high hills. From there, arrows were shot at the enemies, the higher the fortress was, the further the arrows flew; the enemies' hope was to either ram the gate or climb over the wall with ladders and overcome the defenders. For the invading force, these fortifications proved quite difficult to overcome, accordingly, fortresses occupied a key position in warfare.
Passive ring-shaped fortifications of the Medieval era proved vulnerable to damage or destruction by cannon fire, when it could be directed from outside against a perpendicular masonry wall. In addition, an attacking force that could get close to the wall was able to conduct undermining operations in relative safety, as the defenders could not shoot at them from nearby walls. In contrast, the bastion fortress was a flat structure composed of many triangular bastions designed to cover each other, a ditch. In order to counteract the cannonballs, defensive walls were made thicker. To counteract the fact that lower walls were easier to climb, the ditch was widened so that attacking infantry were still exposed to fire from a higher elevation, including enfilading fire from the bastions; the outer side of the ditch was provided with a glacis to deflect cannonballs aimed at the lower part of the main wall. Further structures, such as ravelins, hornworks or crownworks, detached forts could be added to create complex outer works to further protect the main wall from artillery, sometimes provide additional defensive positions.
They were built of many materials earth and brick, as brick does not shatter on impact from a cannonball as stone does. Bastion fortifications were further developed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in response to the French invasion of the Italian peninsula; the French army was equipped with new cannon and bombards that were able to destroy traditional fortifications built in the Middle Ages. Star forts were employed by Michelangelo in the defensive earthworks of Florence, refined in the sixteenth century by Baldassare Peruzzi and Vincenzo Scamozzi; the design spread out of Italy in the 1540s. It was employed throughout Europe for the following three centuries. Italian engineers were in demand throughout Europe to help build the new fortifications; the late-seventeenth-century architects Menno van Coehoorn and Vauban, Louis XIV's military engineer, are considered to have taken the form to its logical extreme. "Fortresses... acquired ravelins and redoubts and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons and crownworks and hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps..."The star-shaped fortification had a formative influence on the patterning of the Renaissance ideal city: "The Renaissance was hypnotized by one city type which for a century and a half—from Filarete to Scamozzi—was impressed upon all utopian schemes: this is the star-shaped city."
In the 19th century, the development of the explosive shell changed the nature of defensive fortifications. Elvas, in Portugal is considered by some to be the best surviving example of the Dutch school of fortifications; when the newly-effective maneuverable siege cannon came into military strategy in the fifteenth century, the response from military engineers was to arrange for the walls to be embedded into ditches fronted by earthen slopes so that they could not be attacked by destructive direct fire and to have the walls topped by earthen banks that absorbed and dissipated the energy of plunging fire. Where conditions allowed, as in Fort Manoel in Malta, the ditches were cut into the native rock, the wall at the inside of the ditch was unquarried native rock; as the walls became lower, they became more vulnerable to assault. The rounded shape, dominant for the design of turrets created "dead space", or "dead" zones, which were sheltered from defending fire, because direct fire from other parts of the walls could not be directed around the curved wall.
To prevent this, what had been round or square turrets were extended into diamond-shaped points to give storming infantry no shelter. The ditches and walls channeled attacking troops into constructed killing grounds where defensive cannon could wreak havoc on troops attempting to storm the walls, with emplacements set so that the attacking troops had no place to shelter from the defensive fire. A further and more subtle change was to move from a passive model of defence to an active one; the lower walls were more vulnerable to being stormed, the protection that the earthen banking provided against direct fire failed if the attackers could occupy the slope on the outside of the ditch and mount an attacking cannon there. Therefore, the shape was designed to make maximum use of enfilade fire against any attackers who should reach t
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Carisbrooke". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the 