File:Brownstone Battery, near Kingswear - geograph.org.uk - 1546642.jpg

English: Brownstone Battery, near Kingswear The rail lines down to the gun emplacement are intact after well over half a century. I imagine that there was winding gear or motive power, given the steepness of the incline. No doubt some military expert will be able to correct this if it is wrong. Presumably ammunition was stored above and was brought down as necessary.

Adrian Buchan sent the following anecdote to me, and he agreed that I could add it to this image:

"This is the National Coastwatch Institution lookout at Froward point on the mouth of the river Dart, Devon. It used to be a WW2 gun battery with two 6 inch naval guns and two searchlights. I first went into this building when I was eight years old, My father took me there in 1951. My father was a telephone engineer in what was then the Post Office telephone service, he had to go there to remove the telephones. ( In those days telephones were very expensive pieces of equipment and were the property of the Post Office) My father drove us there in his little Morris 8 Post Office Telephone's van, which had rubber mudguards and there was a fire extinguisher on the nearside one. There was only a caretaker living there with his family, as far as I can remember they were living in some buildings on the left-hand side as you go through the gate. The caretaker's son who was older than me took me around the site to see the guns. The No 1 gun had already been dismantled and bits of it were lying around on the concrete base, ( you can see the base of this gun on the webcam)the gun barrel had already gone. What I must have been looking at was the gun carriage, I remember seeing a large bronze bearing which must have been part of the gun elevation or azimuth mechanism. The No 2 gun was still intact and it looked as if it had been maintained ready for use. The gun was painted dark green and had a half turret, the back of the turret was covered by a canvas cover. The gun muzzle was covered by a leather or canvas boot, which I took off to look inside. The rifling of the gun bore was well greased with a green grease. Inside the turret everything was painted green, but all the brass wheels and levers were brightly polished. We also went through the tunnel to the base of the gun and all the brass wheels there were also brightly polished. The little railway to carry the ammunition from the magazine to the gun was still complete with its carriage and cable. The two searchlights had been removed, but the buildings still had the shutters and doors intact. I remember looking down through the hole in the roof, which must have been the vent for the fumes from the carbon arc lamp and seeing that the building was empty. The caretaker's son took me into the Battery Observation Post (which is now the National Coastwatch Institution lookout ) and I remember that on the wall facing the windows on the Start Point end of the building was a mechanical device for calculating the bearing of the guns. It consisted of various dials and handles, I saw a similar device on submarines in the seventies, that was used to calculate the angle to fire torpedoes."