Fort Henry, Kingston.

Kingston, taken from Fort Henry.

We are now in Ottawa, at Sleepy Cedars Family Campground where we started our journey across Canada in April of last year. We are now on our last few weeks here.  Our time will be spent on visiting many of the places we have missed in our last 3 trips to this wonderful city and I'm sure we will  re-visit some of the places we been before. The first few days will be spent getting the trailer ready for re-sale by the folks at RV Canada, it will be scrub and polish etc.

Because of the lack of wifi over the last few days we do have a blog or two to catch up with.

Today its Fort Henry, built to protect Kingston and the Rideau Canal from the Americans, after the invasions of 1812 to 1814, Wellington (him of Waterloo) thought it best to be prepared in case it was to happen again.  

The photo above is taken from the fort looking south east. The two towers are part of the defences, they are called Martello towers.  In the mid nineties I worked in Kent in the south of England where there are lots of these towers, there they were built to keep out Napoleon.

The Fort Henry Guard practicing one of their musical walks.

A couple of Armstrong Guns.

 The gunners being inspected before they fired the Noon Gun, and the pic. below is the actual gun, its original and still works, made a hell of a noise when they fired it

Going down into the depths of the fort

Along this damp passage way

To this place, this gun fired a 10lb canister filled with shot, not at attacking solders but at the wall behind them, when it hit the wall it would burst and send shot zipping around the dry moat in all directions, there were two of these monsters, one at each end of the moat.  Fort Henry never fired a shot in anger, which is probably just as well.