Western Redoubt

Western Redoubt
Bermuda
St George's Garrison in 1897-1899 Western Redoubt marked Magazine
Type:	Artillery fort
Location
Location:	32°23’4"N, 64°40’33"W
History
	Built 1850s
Information
Condition:	Increasingly derelict

The Western Redoubt, or Fort William, is a square fort built on a crest on the eastern side of Government Hill, and within the boundaries of the original main British Army camp in Bermuda.

The redoubt is now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as 'Historic Town of St George and Related Fortifications'.

History

The fort, originally intended to be named Fort William was built on a hilltop between Government Hill (from which Government House had moved to Mount Langton in Pembroke Parish with the move of the Parliament of Bermuda and the colonial capital from St George's Town to the then Town of Hamilton in 1815) and Barrack Hill, the site of the Royal Barracks of St. George's Garrison. Below these hills, on the southern, St George's Harbour, side of the island, is St. George's Town.

Fort William was to be one of a number of new forts (most, though not Fort William, built on the sites of earlier forts) housing coastal artillery built in the early and mid-Nineteenth Century within or satellite to St. George's Garrison. The heaviest concentration of coastal artillery batteries and fortifications in Bermuda had, and would continue to be, at the East End of Bermuda, where St. George's Harbour and Castle Harbour (with its own history of fortification) were the only harbours easily accessible from the open Atlantic due to the reefline surrounding Bermuda.

Fort George was completed and armed, and later re-armed with more modern weapons. Fort William was completed but never armed as it was deemed by then to be excess to need. Instead, named the Western Redoubt, a roof was built over the gun floor, moat and keep, and the enclosed structure was used as a magazine. An earlier magazine had existed on Government Hill, from which a hundred barrels of gunpowder was stolen during the American War of Independence and supplied to the rebels in a plot organised by Henry Tucker and Benjamin Franklin. The main powder magazine of Bermuda was later at Hen Island and then Ordnance Island, with another added at Agar's Island later in the nineteenth Century. The magazine in the Western Redoubt would have been subsidiary to the Ordnance depot on Ordnance Island.

In 1957, cutbacks resulted in the closure of the Bermuda Garrison, with all regular units and detachments, including the Command staff, withdrawn, leaving only the part-time Bermuda Militia Artillery and Bermuda Rifles. The dockyard was re-rated as a base, losing its ability to repair or refit its vessels, and this was to close in 1995. All Admiralty and War Office, including St George's Garrison, land was transferred to the colonial government in 1958.

The Western Redoubt would house a restaurant called The Gunpowder Tavern, but has been vacant and increasingly derelict since the 1990s.

Design

The fort is square shaped, and the gunfloor originally had emplacements for four guns, one on each side behind an earthwork glacis. Inside of these was a higher keep, separated from the gunfloor by a dry moat, with a drawbridge. The intended armament would have been for 64-Pounders on the gun floor, and four 24-Pounders atop the keep. The entire fort was roofed over for use as a magazine. The western slope of the hill was excavated to create a vertical escarpment, from which a tunnel forms an entrance from what is now a small car park beside Government Hill (Road).