Alderney
Channel Islands, UK

Click on any of the forts' names to skip right to that fort's information:

The Channel Islands, though today Crown Dependencies of the United Kingdom, have a lot more common history with France, or more accurately Normandy. The genesis of the name Alderney is somewhat at issue, but may be a corruption of Adreni or Alrene, which are similar to the Old Norse word meaning "island near the coast."

Normandy was officially incorporated into the Kingdom of France in 1204, but the Channel Islands remained loyal to England. In the 1540's, King Henry VIII (1491-1547) directed that fortifications be built on Alderney, as part of his program to defend England from potential invasions from France or Spain, due to his break with the Catholic church.

We will find that Great Britain has frequently felt threatened by France. One such happenstance occurred in the 1790's, when France's Revolution was causing a great deal of consternation amongst the crowned heads of Europe. The remarkably tiny Fort Doyle was built at a location that seems an unlikely place for the French to land in 1793, as a "response" to this threat. British gun batteries littered Alderney from 1800 to 1815, with a total of 85 guns of varying sizes on duty throughout the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). Even the Roman "Nunnery" was armed during this period, with two 32-pounder guns!

And in the mid-19th century Great Britain felt even more endangered by France! In 1852 Napoleon III (1808-1873), who had been elected President of France in 1848, majestically declared himself to be Emperor of the Second French Empire. The First French Empire with the first Napoleon (1769-1821) had been such a pain to get rid of, the second or third of either of these entities did not bode well for Britain. Particularly as this latest Napoleon was making suggestions that it might be nice to invade Britain, while building up his military: Especially scary to Great Britain were the improvements that Napoleon III was making to his naval facility at Cherbourg, and, perhaps scariest of all to the seafaring Brits, the French launching of the world's first oceangoing ironclad battleship, the Gloire, in 1859.

Gladstone described the scheme of massively fortifying Alderney as "a monument of human folly, useless to us...but perhaps not absolutely useless to a possible enemy, with whom we may at some period have to deal and who may possibly be able to extract some profit in the way of shelter and accommodation from the ruins." And how right he turned out to be, although the enemy who profited from Alderney's many fortifications would not be France, but Germany, nearly a hundred years in the future.

While there, the Queen demanded to know why none of the forts being built on Alderney were proper starforts, a question to which there is no good answer, as well as being a question that I just made up. Had the Queen actually asked this question, she would have been told that, in the futuristic 1850's, military engineers had come to the conclusion that the classic starfort design, state-of-the-art for the past three centuries, was no longer a match for modern artillery, the technology of which was advancing much faster than anyone building forts could keep up with. That being said, however, one will note below that several of Alderney's forts do indeed have starfortlike aspects.

In 1886 it was decided that the focus of Alderney's defenses would be on Fort Albert, the island's largest and most recently built fort. The suggestion that Alderney might serve as a useful base for small torpedo boats was made, and Fort Albert was armed with two modern six-inch guns, two rapid-fire 12-pounder guns, and two searchlights in 1901. Though each of Alderney's forts had been blessed with a variety of armaments as early as 1859, Fort Albert was the only one in which the British bothered to put modern (breechloading) guns.

All of this feverish construction was of course not undertaken by the Germans themselves, but rather by the 6,000+ slaves they brought with them, shipped in from a number of occupied nations. Four concentration camps were built on the island to hold all of these "workers," and something like 700 of them died on Alderney during the period of German occupation.

The British forts on Alderney are a weird and wonderful cornucopia of fortification styles, from the modern polygonal majesty of Fort Albert to the downright medieval castleishness of Fort Houmet Herbé. Even the names of these forts are a strange mishmash, no doubt owing to the island's Norman roots.

Please read on to learn more specific information about the forts of Alderney!

When Fort Albert was completed in 1859, it was armed with twenty six 68-pounder guns, and seventeen 8" guns. The largest of the forts on Alderney, it was intended to be the island's citadel, to which the island's defenders would retreat if the other forts were overrun by marauding Frenchmen.

To accomplish this rearmament, Fort Albert's cavalier was lowered nearly 12 feet (why put your guns way up in the air for everyone to see and shoot at?). Braye Harbor, that which the British had worked so hard to construct through the 1850's, and over which Fort Albert sat, was unfortunately too shallow to permit the entrance of the ironclad fighting ships that started appearing in the 1860's. Fort Albert was the only of Alderney's forts to be armed with modern guns at this time.

The UCP Group reported plans to open Fort Albert for corporate "team building exercises" and tourism over the next few years, but I don't see anything specific about the fort at their website, and frankly touring a fort while people are shooting at me doesn't sound terribly appealing. But that's just me.

Many of Alderney's forts were repurposed, however, and Fort Clonque may have received the most successful repurposing of them all!

Book your exciting vacation at Fort Clonque here!

Doyle, an Irishman, served as Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey from 1803 to 1816, which doesn't quite jibe with Fort Doyle being named after him in 1793. Perhaps at the time of its construction, the fort was known as "Fort Way Too Tiny To Be Of Any Use Whatsoever." But probably not. In 1859 Fort Doyle was armed with one 8" howitzer and three 8" guns.

The Pope, likely jealous that he was only the VII while Henry was the VIII, said heck no you selfish twit, so Henry proclaimed himself head of the new Church of England, which was of the Protestant persuasion. Infuriating the Catholic church meant infuriating France and Spain, so we have now come back to Henry needing to fortify his domain from what he considered imminent attack. Way to go, Henry.

Castle Essex was named for Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), Earl of Essex. Cromwell aided Henry greatly in his heroic start-a-new-church-so-I-can-do-whatever-I-want thing. Unfortunately he helped Henry too much, bringing some of Henry's subsequent annulments and marriages to fruition, which naturally caused Henry to hate him and thus Cromwell was beheaded in 1540. But his name lives on in this fort. Sort of.

Fast forward to the period of our current interest, namely the mid-18th century. Fort Essex was built atop the remains of the castle. Although the Castle Essex we see today is arguably the most starfortish in appearance of Alderney's forts, it was never armed, serving instead as the island's military hospital.

By 1893, all but one (Fort Albert) of Alderney's forts had been stripped of operational ordnance. Fort Grosnez, however, still proudly mounted two "practice guns," which Alderney's militia got to play with.

Today, Fort Platte Saline is "used in connection with the gravel industry."


Hooray for the gravel industry! Fort Platte Saline in a postcard from the days before the world was in color.

On an island guarded by lots of little fortlets extending out in an unlikely fashion from the shore, Fort Isle de Raz extends the furthest. Built to protect Longis Bay, Alderney's only natural harbor (this fort extends directly into the center of that bay!), Fort Isle de Raz was armed with eight 68-pounder guns and two 8" guns in 1859. It can only be reached by a causeway at low tide.

To be what, exactly? I have no idea! This despite the fort having its very own Facebook page, which is long on cool pictures of the renovation process, but short on any information about what the fort is being renovated into.

At one point, Fort Isle de Raz was home to a bird museum. The walls and ceiling for the portion of the fort that was used for this museum were painted black, as is only proper for a bird museum.

This fort also mounted four 13" mortars, and was the only fortification on Alderney to utilize such monst'rous weapons of war. The idea of heavy mortars used in an antiship capacity was to drop huge shells down onto the unarmored decks of attacking ships. This concept was much embraced by the US Army during its Endicott Period of fortification. Were mortars accurate enough in 1859 to successfully be dropped on a moving, relatively tiny ship's deck? I am making a skeptical face right now.

In addition to giving this fort a way cooler name than Fort Tourgis, the Nazis built a number of gun positions therein. The Stutzpunkt of our current interest was used by the Germans as their main ammunition magazine on Alderney.

To Fort Tourgis' immediate south stands a white, conical marker that was once used as a navigational aid to seafarers trying to sail through the treacherous waters of The Swinge, which is the absolutely delightful name for the waterway to Alderney's northwest.

Infinite thanks to starfort watcher extraordinaire Gareth Hill, for alerting us to the regal existence of Alderney. Many of the wonderful pictures on this page come to us courtesy of photographer Neil Howard, whose Flickriver page is a ridiculously wonderful archive of his visit to Alderney.