Listed building or place reference: BR0089

Historic site reference
Property: La Rocco Tower
Road name: St. Ouens Bay
Parish: St. Brelade
Location: View on map
Grade: Listed Building Grade 1
Category: Anglo-Jersey military structure
Statement of significance: La Rocco Tower is significant as an integral part of a group of surviving Conway towers in Jersey that not only illustrates the changing political and strategic military history of the Island in the late 18th and 19th century, but represents a turning point in the history of defence strategy across Europe, and global trends in the history of war.
Context: n/a
External Description: La Rocco Tower was the last coastal tower in Jersey to be built following the Conway design. It comprises a fortified central tower with large surrounding gun platform, built in an elevated position on top of an offshore rocky outcrop. The tower has a circular plan and is arranged on four levels. The external walls are built of very regular squared and well-tooled blocks of granite, with dressed granite around openings and for the cantilevers of the projecting machicolations. The tower differs in profile from its predecessors as its walls are steeply battered only to a height of around 10ft (rather than the full height), above which they rise vertically. The battered basement level has no external openings and houses the brick vaulted magazine. The single doorway into the tower is raised at first floor level (originally reached by removable ladder but now by granite steps installed in the 1972 restoration). Above the door lintel is a stone inscribed with the date 1800. At both first and second floor levels there is a circuit of square headed loopholes (with internal brick dressings) designed for musketeers - angled downward for close-range fire. Above these are small windows with cambered heads. There is a granite fireplace on both floors, and access between floors is via a spiral stair within the thickness of the wall. The roof platform is supported off the vault below. There is a masonry parapet with four doubled-up projecting machicolations. There is evidence of the damage caused by the landmine explosion(s) during the Second World War - including impact scars on the external walls of the tower and areas of rebuilding and repair carried out in the 1970s, most notably the machicolations. Around the base of the tower is a large stone-built gun battery. The platform is generally oval in plan (this resulting from the 1972 reconstruction, as the original layout was a more irregular 'clover-leaf' plan with lobes housing the five traversing guns). The tall encircling defensive wall of the platform is constructed of dressed granite and in places is of a height equivalent to the tower. External access into the battery is via a narrow land-facing gateway - curving granite steps with iron balustrade leading up from the rocky outcrop below (also steps and slopes cut into the natural shale bedrock lead from the beach). The battery platform is stone-paved with granite-mounting posts for the guns - those on the north side apparently in situ, whilst those on the south side reinstated (the southern section of the platform being severely damaged by the German landmine explosion and rebuilt in 1972). On the northwest side of the battery (facing out to sea) the original traversing gun platform was adapted in the 1940s to house a German installation. There is a pair of inward projecting walls of dressed granite with integral storage, which flank a raised concrete platform incorporating the c.1800 circular granite trackway for traversing gun, in the centre of which is an iron mounting post. The seaward side of this position is reinforced with approximately 7ft of beach pebble concrete.
Internal Description: n/a
Special interest: Architectural,Historical

Documents

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