pendennis castle: history for educational visitors
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8/3/2019 Pendennis Castle: History for Educational Visitors
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BOOKING AND SITE INFORMATION
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Ramparts
Discovery Centre
Tunnel to Half
Moon Battery
Crab Quay Blockhouse
(Little Dennis)
Battery Observation
Post
Half Moon
Battery
Tudor Gun
Tower
Barrack Block and
Education Zones
Gatehouse and
Guardhouse
Entrance
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Pendennis Castle
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Cor nwall’s greatest fortr ess from Tudors and Stuarts to Victorians and W WII
Spectacular views of the coast and town and the opportunity to study landformsFully equipped education rooms with Discovery Chests of artefacts
Discovery Visits - workshops for Key Stages 1-3 (charge applies)
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stone bridge
guardroom
kitchen
gun room
Upper Gun Room
roof
lookout turret
Governor’s Lodging
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The at the entrance would or iginally have been a wooden drawbr idge.
There is a fine carving of the Tudor royal coat-of-arms above the door . Below this
is an empty r ecess, probably for the governor at the time to display his coat-of-arms.
If you turn left just inside the door you enter a . There is an eighteenth
century cast-iron grate displaying the three cannons of the Board of Ordnance (thebody in charge of forts and cannon and responsible for appointing the governor).
In the basement is a . This contains a cooking hearth and ovens. This area
would have or iginally been divided into a kitchen, cel nd larder. At one time
there would also have been a well here to provide fres in times of siege.
There is also a latrine.
Back on the ground floor, there is an octagonal . It has gunports
(embrasures) on seven of its sides. Originally the windows would have been cir cular
to allow the canon to poke through but they have since been adapted. It is likely
that this gun room would have been used only if the threatened invasion by Spain
and France in the early 1540s had happened before construction of the tower was
completed. The room served as a mess room and barracks for the garrison. The
gunners would have slept in hammocks or on the floor, and eaten their meals here.
Upstairs is the and you can now see a reconstruction of how it
would have been in Tudor times. Ropes and pulleys ena ed the guns to be pulled
back into the firing position once they had recoiled on being fired. The Tudor
builders did try to ventilate each gun port, but even so, the conditions in this room
when the canon were fired must have been similar to th n board a warship of
the time: cramped, noisy, dark and choking. The gunpowder gave off a thick smokethat would have lingered in the room.
Up on the is where the most impor tant gun platform would have been. The
is thought to have been the location from which the great Spanish
Ar mada of 1588 was first spot ted from the mainland. From here you can enjoy the
best views across to St Mawes Castle on the other side of the Fal Estuary and
westwards towards the Lizard.
Going down the steps through the parapet to the north and climbing down the
wider spiral stairs in the tur ret takes you to the .
Tour : The Tudor Gun Tower
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The Gatehouse and Guardhouse
The Discovery Centre
Enemy Sighted
Signal Sent
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The large expanse of open ground in the interior of the castle was not always like
this. From the early days of the for tress there was a succession of houses, barrack
block, stores and general buildings inside the ramparts to serve the garr ison. Many
were temporary structures, made of wood, which have di appeared
without a trace. During the Civil W ar, the area was occupied by a windmill,
houses and gardens, during the Fir st W orld W ar there was a hutted camp and during
the Second the area was covered with prefabricated corrugated iron N issan huts.
There would originally have been a wooden drawbridge over the earthen ramparts
at the entrance. The present gatehouse and guardrooms are late 17th century and
possibly the earliest purpose-built barracks in Britain. The rooms have now been
restored as they would have appeared in the First W or ld War. Ar my rules were
strict and petty offences such as drunkenness or neglect of duties could result in
soldiers spending time locked up in here.
The Discovery Centre contains displays with a military a number of
periods, which will enable pupils to compare one phase of history at Pendennis with
another. The displays are themed to follow three main stages of defence.
is about seeking out and identifying all potential enemies at sea or in
the air. The display shows how sixteenth century lookouts had to rely on their eyes,
but advances in surveillance were made with the invent on of the telescope in the
seventeenth century and binoculars in the nineteenth century. Finally, the display
shows how Radar was one of the greatest breakthroughs of coast defence At first itcould detect aircraft approaching by radio waves, but could not identify friend or foe.
By 1941, this problem was solved and at Pendennis radar was used to locate and
track enemy hips and submarines. Enemy vessels could be spotted by day or night at
a far greater distance than even the best binoculars.
Once the enemy is sighted, defence forces must be aler ted quickly. looks
at communicating information about the enemy to the gun crews. Throughout its
history, Pendennis was part of a wider local and national defence network. This panel
provides an explanation of the different forms of communication at Pendennis
through the ages ranging from fire beacons, flags, semaphore, heliographs, telegraph,
lamp signals, telephone and radio.
Tour : Inside the Fortres
Inside the Guardhouse
Interior view of a cell
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Command Fire
The BatteryObservation Post
The Ramparts
Half Moon Battery
underground
ammunition store (magazine and war shelter
guns
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considers the most effective means to destroy the enemy. The
section covers the history of the guns at Pendennis and the rapid advances in
technology. The displays are designed to allow a hands-on approach using replica
models, which give pupils the oppor tunity of handling jects relevant to the
particular period of history.
This is set up as it would have appeared in W orld W ar Two. It was designed to
be an observation area from which they could observe and monitor shipping
movements in the English Channel.
This information was then used to control the settings on the guns in Half Moon
Battery. The room is painted dark blue to minimise glare.
Henry VIII’s forts had been designed to counter attack from the sea but were
vulnerable to a land siege. Their weakness lay in the ‘dead ground’ created infront of a round tower where a defender could not see an attacker. In the late
sixteenth century, the castle was surrounded by ramparts (earthen-backed walls)
and bastions (projecting angular obstacles).
From One Gun Battery, you can walk through the tunnel in the ramparts to the
Half Moon Battery. The battery has this name because of its semicircular shape.
It was created, together with its twin at St Anthony’s Head, to turn fire power
away from the estuary channel and out to the wider sea. It became Falmouth’s
principal line of defence in World War Two. You can visit the
) with a guide.
The here had a range of about 12 miles. The concrete canopies were built
over the gun positions in 1940 to protect them from aerial attack. Camouflage
nett ing would have further hidden them. On the wall are hooks for the regulation
gas masks, helmets and capes that the gunners had to h th them. The gun
commander received information from the Battery Observ on Post.
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Crab Quay Battery and the Blockhouse (Little Dennis)
Crab Quay Battery
The Blockhouse
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They made corrections for speed, wind
direction and the tide. The greatest
threat came at night, when detection and
accurate firing were more difficult.
Searchlights on Pendennis Point were
therefore coordinated to illuminatepossible targets for the guns.
In 1944, it took 99 people to staff Half
Moon Battery every 24 hours. Of these,
only 36 were gunners and the rest were searchlight operators and staff involved in
position finding and communication tasks.
is the best landing place on the headland.
(Little Dennis) is the earliest Tudor fortification on the Pendennis
Headland. It was almost certainly built in 1538 as a stop-gap measure to put cannon
on until the main castle could be completed.
View of
Little Dennis
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Timeline
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Pendennis Castle is a mixture of fortifications spanni over four hundred years.
W ithin the Elizabethan ramparts is one of Henry VIII’s castles, part of an
internationally impor tant chain of defences built in the 1540s along the south coast in
response to the threat of invasion.
By 1538 Henry VIII’s simultaneous divor ce of Catherine of Aragon and break withthe Pope had placed him in a perilous position. England faced the threat of invasion
from both France and Spain. Protection for the Channel ports became an urgent
necessity. The resulting chain of for ts and blockhouse ected the power and
efficiency of new types of heavy gun, made possible by better casting techniques
perfected in the King’s own foundries. Although the pl ns of individual buildings
varied, all were low and massive, with several levels of guns mounted in
emplacements designed to enable them to command a wide field of fire.
Pendennis Castle was begun in 1540, together with a smaller fort near the water’s
edge called Lit tle Dennis. At first the castle consisted of a round, keep-like guntower with a basement kitchen, but a surrounding earth-filled platform for more
guns was added almost immediately and an entrance block containing a residence for
the governor a few years later. Fifty-six years later, fear of a second Armada led
Queen Elizabeth I to provide a huge outer line of defe astle, with
projecting bastions and stone-faced ramparts designed to absorb cannon shot.
These fortifications were still effective when the castle was besieged by
Parliamentary forces during the Civil War fifty years later. By March 1646 the
Royalists had lost the war and the King was a pr isoner ands of the Scots, but
John ‘Jack-for-the-King’ Arundell held out at Pendennis until starvation forced him to
surrender five months later. Unlike many castles, Pendennis was too important to be‘slighted’ after its capture.
Historical Background
Reconstruction of 17 August
1646—The ‘Honourable’surrender of Royalist troops
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During the next three centuries, Pendennis’ defences were periodically up-graded,
including the installation of new and powerful guns in 1894. In the early twentieth
century a large barrack block was built to house a permanently stationed Regiment
of Royal Garrison Artillery, and as late as the Second W orld W ar, Pendennis’powerful coast artillery guns protected convoys and wa ips assembling or seeking
shelter in the quiet waters of the estuary.
After this, new fighting technology made
Pendennis and all coastal artillery obsolete,
and the army finally left in 1956.
The Barrack Block, part of which houses the Education Z ones to day
The interior of the reconstructed
war shelter. The order ‘stand to’
has interrupted a meal!
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