English Coast Blog

74 Martello Towers were built along the coast of Kent and East Sussex, between 1805 and 1808 to guard against invasion by Napoleon along with other defensive measures such as Forts, Redoubts and the Royal Military Canal (which runs through Hythe).

The inspiration for the south coast implementation of these distinctive round towers came from a British attack in 1794 on Mortella Point in Corsica. The Mortella Point tower resisted attack from the Royal Navy ships HMS Fortitude and HMS Juno, resulting in 60 casualties on the British ships and the ships had to abandon the attack. It was left to the army to eventually take the tower after 2 days of heavy fighting. The tower had achieved this long resistance with only 38 men, one 6-pounder gun and two 18-pounder guns.

The name Martello Tower took a while to settle on by the English military planners, probably originating from ‘Torri de Martello’, the name given to watchtowers in parts of Western Italy, but also perhaps from one Naval officer who described Mortella Point as ‘Myrtello Point’ as the headland that the tower stood on was covered with wild myrtle. Other descriptions used were ’sea-towers’, ‘bomb-proof towers’, or ‘Corsican towers’ and in 1803 finally as ‘Martello towers’.

The towers never actually saw active service of course, Napoleon’s planned invasion came to nothing particularly after the Battle of Trafalgar defeat for the French Fleet which forced Napoleon to look elsewhere for conquest. Read the rest of this entry »

Description of Goodwin Sands

The Goodwin Sands are a notorious stretch of sands just off the coast of Kent in the English Channel. Submerged at high tides, with areas being exposed and drying sufficiently for a man to walk on at low tides, they present a particular challenge to shipping especially given their unfortunate location… at the narrowest part of the busiest shipping channel in the world.

Image: The Goodwin Sands, reproduced under Project Gutenberg License

The Goodwin Sands are around four miles offshore, beginning near Kingsdown, Kent and ending around Pegwell Bay, just south of Ramsgate, a total length of around nine miles. The channel between the coast and the sands is known as the Downs, and although the sands present a grave danger to shipping, their position has also provided protection and thus the Downs and Goodwin Sands, and the protective Harbour at Ramsgate made this area historically important. In fact it may be true to say that over the past 1000 years, this stretch of the English Channel can be considered historically the most important stretch of water in the world.

History

The geological history of the Goodwin Sands is disputed; some believing it was previously an island which became swamped by sediment and rising sea levels, others that is simply an accumulation of sediment swept into place by the English Channel funnelling back and forth through the narrow straits of Dover. It is true that the nearby Thanet area was in fact an island back in Roman times (hence the full title; Isle of Thanet) and this may lead people to believe the Goodwin Sands are of a similar nature. However the few attempts at surveying the Sands by drilling have not shown any evidence of soil or organic matter which would suggest an island existed. It is more likely that the Sands are simply an accumulation of sediment on a predominantly solid chalk base.

Since the first recorded shipwreck in the Goodwin Sands area dating back to 1298, the maritime history is one of enormous loss of life and shipping. Ships, the crew and passengers that become stranded on the sands were often facing a terrible fate. Typically a ship would break its back as the tide changed, survivors may have been able to clamber onto the sands as the tide receded, and light fires and attempt to attract the attention of the Boatsmen of Deal and Kingsdown, or the lifeboats in later eras. If no help was forthcoming then within hours the tide would return, the sands would turn into lethal quicksand, and ships and survivors would be engulfed. Many ships were simply swallowed whole within a few days.
Read the rest of this entry »

Nice illustration of coastal erosion, photo taken of the white cliffs of Dover, St.Margaret’s Bay. The cliff fall occurred early 2008. The paths above the cliffs do warn you to stay 10 metres from the edge, and when you see evidence of the cliff falls it makes you take notice of the warnings!

I’ve been fascinated by some of the HDR (High Dynamic Range) images that you find on the web, and was keen to try it out myself. The main concern I had was whether the use of HDR is part of the art of photography, or whether it makes it ‘too easy’ to create great images. If it does make it ‘too easy’ then does that actually matter?

Anyway to test it out I took a single fairly ordinary RAW image (Nikon NEF) that I had taken at the weekend, and tried to create an HDR image to see what difference this would make.

The image is of a sea wall at St.Margarets at Cliffe, near Dover, Kent, England. I took the photo on my way back from shooting a panorama, simply because there were three white rocks in a line, no real attempts at composition or anything (it had started raining and I wanted to get back to the car!). Here is the original JPG copy of the image straight from the camera (resized in Photoshop):

 Using Dynamic-Photo HDR software, I imported the NEF version of the file, selected the ‘eye-catching’ mode, adjusted the tone mapping and here is the result:

5 minutes work has certainly made for a more dramatic image. Certainly oversaturated, the white stones have turned gray, I clearly need to do some finetuning, but it does give an indication of what is possible.

An improvement? I’ll leave that for others to decide!