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Fort L'Ecluse
Thu 22 June 2006 9:06pm
There were no meetings yesterday afternoon, so I took the chance to go
back to Fort L'Ecluse, over the border in France. I haven't visited it
properly since I was here as a student more than ten years ago, and it's
only open during the summer. You can see from the picture that it's pretty
dramatic: that's one fort, the Fort Superieur, at the top of a 250m cliff,
looking down to the Fort Inferieur, which itself is above a 90m drop down to
the River Rhone. But it gets better: there's
a staircase inside the cliff, that goes up 1165 steps from one to
the other!
You can't really see the Fort Inferieur in the first picture (it's mostly
behind the tree) and the arch on the right is the 1930's road tunnel that
was dug to bypass it. Until then, the outer courtyard was part of the main
route from France to Geneva, and used as a choke point to impose customs
duties and control who crossed the frontier.
This is the French side of the Fort Inferieur, showing the base of the cliff
and the gateway. The bridge was originally a drawbridge, and the walls
bristle with openings for muskets and artillery pieces.
You can see that even the lower fort is stacked on four levels (including
firing galleries below the level of the bridge), and these extend back into
the cliff, with vaults that were used as barracks and powder magazines.
There's even a tunnel that goes back and down towards the roof of the road
tunnel, and apparently it was packed with explosives in 1939.
Back in 1994, a lot less of the fort was open, and the fort was less
"sanitised" and safe. The last time I went in 1994, they recognised
that I'd been more than once that summer and lent me the key to the gates to
the staircase up to the upper fort. Now, the gate is permanently open, so I
didn't need to be so lucky. Here is one of the many flights of those 1165
stairs, and even inside all that cold stone, it was hard work on a hot day
like yesterday.
Each flight of stairs ends in a gallery for artillery, with embrasures
opening out of the cliff face and allowing the approaches to be covered for
miles around. Most of these huge spaces include stone huts for the soldiers,
which would be easier to keep warm in winter, and have roofs and walls
separated from the living rock to keep out the damp.
You still can't get out into the Fort Superieur - just to the last gate into
its courtyard - but the view is pretty much the same from the cannon platforms
as from the highest tower of that fort. You can see the gray waters of the
Rhone at the bottom, and the rich flat farmlands stretching out towards
Geneva. The pass that L'Ecluse controls is very narrow, with a 950m mountain
on the other side that you can see the treeclad base of here.
From roughly the same position, I also took a picture looking down onto
the Fort Inferieur - showing the round tower and French flag that were also
in the photo of the lower fort's main gate.
Even though you can't (yet?) get out into the upper fort, it's still possible
to visit it's exterior: there is a road going about halfway up, starting at
the village of Longeray, and then a path. The views are equally dramatic,
but to finish here is the rusted door of it's main gate.
Contact info
Dr Andrew McNab,
Department of Physics
and Astronomy,
University of Manchester,
Manchester,
United Kingdom,
M13 9PL
Andrew.McNab@cern.ch
Phone: +44-161-306-6474
Fax: +44-161-273-5867
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