it's the fort that counts

A few loose ends to tidy up, mostly documenting of interesting walks that I deem worthy of mention here. This isn't exactly that, but is something I missed from my list of What We Did On Our Holidays when we went for a long weekend in Dorset a month or so ago. I see I did briefly mention that we'd been to Weymouth, but forgot to mention that in addition to walking around the harbour area and paying a very brief visit to the beach we also went to Nothe Fort, an interesting fortified complex occupying a site overlooking the harbour mouth and Portland Harbour to the south which has served many purposes over the years since its construction in the second half of the 19th century.

Most of the exhibits in the main central courtyard on the hot sunny day we were there were concerned with its use during the Second World War - essentially the same use as it was put to in the 19th century, i.e. as a base for launching big lumps of exploding metal at seagoing vessels belonging to the enemy; only the flag flown by the enemy and the technical complexity of the exploding devices really changing much over time. 

There was also an interesting audio-visual installation featuring some old black-and-white photographs from the fort's lengthy period of dereliction in the second half of the 20th century, and some recent sound recordings of the people who used to use it as an unauthorised adventure playground during that time; mostly teenagers at the time but in their sixties and seventies when the recordings were made. These were interesting, although as with anything involving old-ish people reminiscing about their childhood adventures there was the occasional unpalatable whiff of Kids Today With Their Bloody Computers and some suggestion that It Never Did Us Any Harm, as long as you don't count Fat Alan who fell off a wall onto a rusty spike and died.

A note on pronunciation; the audio-visual material we watched fairly consistently pronounced it Nothe to rhyme with "betrothe" or "clothe", rather than to rhyme with, say "both", "broth" or "frothy". The picture below shows Huwie and Alys at the controls of a Bofors gun, about to mercilessly shell downtown Weymouth to secure enough beach space to build a sandcastle.