"Firing into the Brown" #36 - "Fort Hillsea" stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update...

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An interesting snippet from the "Illustrated Times" of April 26th, 1862, that I found somewhere on Farcebook. If you click on it, it should embigen pleasingly, and also just about be readable...  the interesting bit is right at the bottom which makes reference to "Fort Hillsea" (sic)

So another bit of the Hilsea lines, but in this case a part that is no longer there, and indeed long gone..

See following for what those rather fanciful gates in the article would have actually looked like - this picture is taken looking north - note the guardhouses either side on what would have been the "inside" of the wall as far as any enemy is concerned..

"View looking north through Hilsea Arches to Cosham, England, with a tram under the arches, circa 1900. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)"

The Arches were demolished about 1920'ish (I've seen multiple sources quoting anything between 1919 and 1922, and it could well be they are all right as it must have taken a while). as part of access improvements to the island - at the time there would only have been one road* onto the whole island and I would have thought that by then, with the exponential growth in motorised and other traffic, the double arches would have been more than a bit of a choke point...  

This shows them mid-destruction..  one of the arches has already gone - view is looking north again..
picky courtesy Portsmouth City Museum

...and this is where they would have been, picture taken from what would have been the northern side of them...  very roughly, they would have lined up between the building on the left, and the petrol station/loo's on the right...  

See following - this picture would have been taken from the same side of the arches as the above - but probably later 1930s'ish and shows the fortifications either side of the Arches also being demolished (for two bus depots of all things!)... you can just see the remains of the old guard houses..

The aforementioned bus depot (at least it's still there 😏) ..  the Lines run west of it .. behind the tree's

* over the years that road access has changed three times - this was the first incarnation (following).. two lanes, simple metal bridge, wooden deck, eventually reinforced so as to carry trams, but note the 'mechanicals' in the middle. The bridge was designed to retract, to roll back, so as to allow the passage of the gunboats foreseen as being part of the overall defences for the Lines

By the 1930's we got this one - following - four lanes, concrete sides..  this picture was taken in 1939..  you can see why those arches and the fortifications had to go! Note the lamp posts, by the way..

The 3rd iteration arrived in the 1970's and is known round here as the 'Hilsea Wall of Death' - far too dull to show a picture of, but some of the the remains of the second iteration can still be seen (following) - and those are the same lamp posts we see behind that sandbagged guard point in the picture above...

You can see the line of the creek (following) that still makes Portsmouth the island it is.. imagine 150 years ago, and there could have been gunboats patrolling that stretch of water as part of the overall defence strategy for the lines..

..and this is the remains of the old bridge - now a car park alongside the new access road...  history is all around us.. 😀

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...