For generations, young men from Leith fished for crab and mackerel from the side of a squat stone tower next to the port’s eastern pier.
The nearby sands, tide permitting, were also a popular venue for picnics, where cups of freshly-brewed tea invariably tasted slightly salty.
Not any more, of course; those beaches were lost beneath the extension of Leith Docks between 1936 and 1943, while that squat stone erection — known locally as the “Tally Too’er” (or “Tally To’or”, depending on who you ask) — was half-buried by the new breakwater. Officially a B-listed historic monument, it’s now no longer officially accessible to the public; a somewhat forlorn and neglected piece of Scotland’s military history.
For the now-landlocked Tally Too’er is nothing less than Scotland’s first Martello Tower, one in a vast network of gun placements built by the British Army during a period of roughly 80 years up to 1860. The majority of these towers, especially from 1805, were constructed along England’s southern and eastern coasts as a first line of defence against Napoleon. However, so effective was their design that remnants of such towers can be found in locations as diverse as Quebec, Delhi and the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.
Named after Mortella Point on Corsica, where a similarly designed tower proved a tough nut to crack for the Royal Navy, the construction of the three Martello Towers in Scotland was inspired not so much by Napoleon as the activities of French, Dutch and American privateers. Still-fractious political relations between Britain and its former 13 American colonies, notably over trade, also played their part; protection of the assembly point for Britain’s Baltic and Scandinavian convoys would become a matter of considerable urgency, not least because the Royal Navy depended on these routes for much of their own supplies.
As early as 1807, the British Government’s Board of Ordnance proposed the construction of a defensive tower on Mussel Cape Rocks at the entrance to Leith Harbour. According to Major Alexander Bryce, RE, the Commanding Engineer North Britain, the tower would be 52-feet (16-metres) high — although only 36-feet (11-metres) would be above water level — with a base diameter of 44-feet (13.5-metres) and an upper gun-platform diameter of 32-feet (9.8-metres). In 1810, the Inspector General of Fortifications, Lieutenant-General Robert Morse, opted to enlarge the design, increasing the base diameter to almost 80-feet (24.6-metres), the height above water to 45-feet (13.8-metres) and redeveloping the gun platform to mount three heavy guns.
Although funding for the tower came from the Board of Ordnance, Bryce’s decision to delegate the tower’s actual construction to the Edinburgh Corporation proved somewhat problematic. Let’s just say that, given the results of some more recent construction projects in the Scottish capital, readers shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Martello tower at Leith ended up both costing significantly more than originally estimated (coming in at more than £17,000) and decades late!
In fact, it would be the best part of 30 years before the Board of Ordnance was finally able to take possession of the tower in 1838; and, even then, it wasn’t finished! Another decade on, a War Office report on Scotland’s forts, towers and batteries described the tower as “a mere Shell of Stonework into which the sea flows from 12 to 15 feet [3.6 to 4.6-metres] deep every tide, and is altogether useless.” It wouldn’t be until 1853 — the best part of half a century after the tower was first proposed — that the installation would be reported as being “in good order and fit to receive troops”. By then, of course, it was too late; the Napoleonic and privateer threats which had inspired the tower’s construction were long past, and the tower was never armed. It didn’t even play any role in the protection of the Firth of Forth during either of the World Wars.
Scotland’s two other Martello towers were built significantly further north, to guard over the merchant shipping that regularly gathered in Longhope Sound on Hoy in the Orkney Islands. The Admiralty, in their wisdom, dismissed the idea of permanently stationing a warship in the location, so the matter of providing some form of deterrence to hostile shipping was passed on to the Board of Ordnance. They authorised the construction of a battery of eight guns and two Martello towers in June 1813, with work speedily beginning on the site the following month.
Each of the two most-northern towers was 47-feet (14.4-metres) in diameter and 33-feet (10.1-metres) high, had walls ranging between 9-feet 6-inches (2.9-metres) and 6-feet 3-inches (1.92-metres) thick, and carried one 24-pounder gun. Unlike the Leith tower, they only cost £5,264.16s each to build. Within the parapet wall there were the usual recesses for ammunition; however, there was also a urinal attached to an external pipe to provide some sanitation for the soldiers stationed there!
While construction of both towers — one at Hackness, the other on the Crockness headland across the bay — began in July 1813, the scale of the overall project meant that, like so many of the Martello towers before them, they were not actually completed until after the military threat which inspired them had been dealt with through other means — in this case, by the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, a peace accord between Britain and America.
Consequently, the towers and battery were left largely “disarmed”, with the the Crockness tower reportedly being completely “uninhabitable” as early as 1852. Significantly, the battery — along with many other coastal defences — was upgraded in 1866 in response to the perceived threat from the American Fenian Brotherhood, during the American Civil War, but afterwards was effectively “mothballed”, with only two artillerymen left to look after the guns and powder magazine. Again, neither the battery nor the two towers saw the action for which they had been designed, a situation only confirmed by the construction of newer defences on Flotta.
The guns at Hackness are thought to have been removed at the start of the 20th century, and the closest both barracks and towers came to military action was being used either for training purposes by the local volunteer force or for hosting signallers during the First World War. Following the Armistice, the battery and tower at Hackness, along with 10 acres of land, were sold to its former caretaker, William Cload, and would remain in his family until purchased by Historic Scotland in 1995 and turned into a museum.
Today, many of the Martello Towers built by the British government around the world are disused and derelict like those at Leith and Crockness. Others, though, have found new lives as private residences, holiday homes, museums and tourist information centres. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, it’s easy to suggest that they were, as the English pamphleteer (and later MP) William Cobbett said in 1823, a total waste of money; expensive, slow to construct and — thanks to new rifled ordnance — almost immediately obsolete. If nothing else, though, they’re a physical reminder of how military deterrence seldom ever comes cheap.
First published in The Scots Magazine, October 2014.
