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Updated: May 26, 2025
The ruins which at present occupy this remarkable site consist of a strong wall, guarded by numerous bastions and pierced by four gateways, which runs round the brow of the hill in a slightly irregular ellipse, of some interesting remains of buildings within this walled space, and of a few insignificant traces of inferior edifices on the slope between the plain and the summit.
If you follow the direction and descend for half a mile you come to a couple of villas, a humble café, some fishermen's cottages, one of which is also a general shop and a débit de tabac, a view of a triangle of sea, and eventually to a patch of shingly beach between two great bastions of cliffs.
Above to the right, on one of the western bastions of the Plain, is the White Horse just mentioned. It is of great size 180 feet long and 107 in height. It was "restored" many years ago and the ancient grotesque outline altered by vandals who should have known better. Above the figure is the great entrenched camp called Bratton Castle, containing within its walls 23 acres.
It has twenty two bastions mounted with artillery, and is surrounded by a broad moat, generally well filled with water.
In the centre stood the fort, which was a hundred and twenty yards square, mounting ten thirty-two pounder guns on each of its four bastions. Twenty four-pounder guns were placed on the ramparts, facing the river on the south. On an outlying work commanding the watergate eight thirty-two pounders were mounted.
We ran back our pieces through the gorge of the bastions, wheeled them in on the terre-plein back from the wall, and cocked them higher on their trunnions to get them in train for the opposite peak. "Boom!" went the first gun, and a bit of brown earth spat up to the left of the enemy, low by a dozen paces.
The Guards gained their point, and so did the Column at B in part, for the French were killed in great numbers on Bastion H, in fact, eleven Bastions were taken, and all before midnight; but from this period till 7 in the morning, when the affair closed, I can give you no clear account.
The old Field-Marshal and chief commander of the Austrian forces in Lombardy, prompted by the counsels of his sagacious adlatus, the chief of the staff, was engaged at that period in adding some of those ugly round walls and flanking bastions to Verona, upon which, when Austria was thrown back by the first outburst of the insurrection and the advance of the Piedmontese, she was enabled to plant a sturdy hind-foot, daring her foes as from a rock of defence.
George and the children gazed around upon the confused mass of ruined bastions, towers, battlements, and archways, that lay before them, with a feeling of awe which it is impossible to describe. The grass waved and flowers bloomed on the tops of the walls, on the sills of the windows, and on every projecting cornice, or angle, where a seed could have lodged.
Within this narrowed circle the same obstinate resistance was to be offered as before, and the bastions and redoubts of the new entrenchment were to be baptized with the same uncouth names which two long years of terrible struggle had made so precious.
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