A “saga of procrastination and sharp practice”: the thread about Leith’s Tally Toor

If you were to go down to Leith Docks and venture where security won’t let you go, you would eventually come across a squat, circular and very curious masonry structure. What you have just found is the Tally Toor, the Leith Martello Tower. You would be forgiven for not realising it was there or for never having heard of it. It doesn’t look like much of a tower, but that’s because most of it has been buried within the reclaimed land behind the Easter Breakwater of the Port of Leith. There was a time when this once stood proudly upon the rocks in the Leith Roads.

The Leith Martello Tower. CC-BY-SA 2.0 Richard Webb

Martello Towers were a response to the threat of coastal attacks or even invasion during the Napoleonic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were built throughout the British Isles and out into the Empire, but Leith is one of only three that were constructed in Scotland. The word Martello (or Tally to Leithers) is an Anglicisation of Torra di Mortella – a medieval Genoese round tower in the north of Corsica. This fortification caused the Royal Navy such disproportionate trouble to overcome it during the Siege of Saint Florent in 1794 that it was taken as a model defensive outpost for home use. The thirty-three men at Mortella had resisted bombardment of British warships and had held off the 700 men sent ashore to take it that it inspired a home grown variant as a model defensive outpost.

Watercolor drawing “View of Mortella Tower” by William Porter, 1794-1796. The Mariners’ Museum #1936.0491.000001/QW83

The basic design of the British tower is rather like a squat lighthouse and they were to be located at advantageous coastal positions. Entrance was via a raised door accessed through a retractable ladder to make capture from the land more difficult. Inside, behind the thick stone walls, were two floors of accommodation and storage for an officer and about twenty-five men. Buried within the foundations would be a well and/or water cistern and perhaps a storeroom. But unlike a lighthouse, instead of a navigation beacon on the top instead there was an open fighting platform fitted with two or three heavy guns that could pivot be trained to attack approaching targets. The height of the tower meant it fired down upon ships, affording a raised and protected position for observation and signalling.

British sketch plan of the Torra di Mortella made after capture in 1794. It shows how the three guns mounted atop could be pivoted to command wide arcs of fire against would be attackers. Royal Museums Greenwish, PAD1622

The Tally Toor was not the first Georgian-era fortification to defend Leith. In 1779, Leith and Edinburgh had been threatened by the squadron of the American John Paul Jones during the War of Independence and the city had responded to the threat from the sea by building Leith Fort to guard the harbour entrance. The Fort was never entirely satisfactory and for most of its life was used as an ordnance depot, a drill barracks for artillery volunteers and as accommodation for army administrators. In light of its deficiencies in 1807 the Board of Ordnance proposed a thirty-two foot high Martello tower on the rocks at the mouth of the Port of Leith to improve the defences.

Admiralty coastal chart, Fisherrow to Queensferry, 1860. This shows the position of the Mortella (sic) Tower relative to the approach to the Port of Leith and also Leith Fort towards the lower, left-hand corner. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Somewhat unusually, the tower was not to be built by the military but was left to the Corporation of the City of Edinburgh to construct. Work began in 1809 but due to a “saga of procrastination and sharp practice” and it was not finally handed over to the Board until nearly 30 years later in 1838. The below painting by Robert Norie shows the end of the outer breakwater at Leith as it then was, with the tower being accessible across the interidal rocks at low water. The incomplete base storeys are being used as a handy mooring point for fishing boats.

Martello Tower, Leith, Low Water by Robert Norie, 1830s © Edinburgh City Museums

It had cost £17,179 18s 4½d, and it wasn’t even finished! Plus ça change for a construction project by the council in Edinburgh! The final structure was 45 feet high, with 16 feet of foundations built down into the rocks. The base diameter was 80 feet and the gun platform at the top was large enough to accommodate not one but three pivoting cannons. As a result of this, from the top the tower has an elegant cloverleaf (or fidget spinner!) appearance on account of the three overlapping gun positions.

Plan and section of the Leith Martello Tower. The height between the lines of A and B has been truncated in half by the artist. Via Trove.Scot SC495680

Within the foundations was a single central chamber and there were two staircases within the walls, leading up to the gun platform. Due to the relative peace with other European powers by the time it was completed the tower was not finally made ready to accept its guns until 1853, thirty-five years after it was first planned, prompted by the crisis of the Crimean War.

The Martello Tower is prominent on the right hand side of “Leith Races” by William Thomas Reed, c. 1811. © Edinburgh City Museums

According to “Martello Towers Worldwide” (where would one be without a copy of that handy?) at that time it was armed with two 32-pdr cannons and was occupied (when required) by a detachment from Leith Fort until 1869 when it was mothballed. The 32-pdr was so-called because it fired a shot weighing thirty-two pounds and was the Royal Navy’s standard heavyweight shipboard weapon. The handy diagram below shows the main parts including the rammer, wad and pricker (no giggling at the back!)

Illustration of a 32 pounder cannon

These were the same such guns as were also mounted at Leith Fort itself, as can be seen in a series of earlier photos made there by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson.

Major Crawford, Major Wright, Captain St George and Captain Bortingham of the Leith Fort Artillery. David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, 1843-47. National Galleries Scotland

The 1849 Ordnance Survey Town Plan clearly shows the tower and also one presumes the obvious route for the garrison to reach it should they ever need to across the barrier of intertidal rocks known as The Weir” the same route as shown in Norie’s painting.

OS 1849 Town Plan. Note the stairs from the sea wall on the left down to the rocks of “The Weir”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The rocks on which the Tower was situated, once the Mussell Cape Rocks, became known instead as the Martello Rocks. Further, smaller towers for the Forth were planned at Cramond Island and Inchkeith but were judged not to be a pressing need and so work never started; given how long it took and how much it cost to build the first, that was probably a sensible decision. These would have carried two 24-pdr cannons rather than the three 32-pdrs at Leith. In 1854, the Inspector General of Fortifications prepared a report on the Forth defences in which he stated:

At Leith there are at present twelve heavy guns, mounted for the protection of the harbour and roadstead at Leith Fort and on a tower; it would be, however, very desirable to establish two batteries and a small barrack on the Island of Inch Keith.

Burgoyne’s report

After 1869 the disarmed tower was abandoned, just 15 or so years after it had finally been completed and occupied. Thereafter its main function was an interesting navigation marker for the approaches to Leith.

“Leith Martello Tower” by Francis William Staines (1800-76), with Inchkeith in the background. via Artwarefineart.com.

As war clouds gathered and dispersed again on the horizon, there were occasional plans to re-establish the Tower as a defensive position. It was proposed in the 1880s to mount a 6-inch Rifled Breech Loader (RBL) gun on top, which appears never to have been completed. In 1891 an even bigger 9.2-inch Breech Loader (BL) gun was proposed but by 1894 it was instead suggested to place two 6-inch BL guns on the dock walls. In 1899, approval was given for two 4.7-inch Quick Firing (QF) guns for the Tower but once again these do not ever seem to have been installed. The following year it was back to two 6-inch pieces but again these remained paper plans. All these proposals are detailed in The Fortification of the Firth of Forth 1880-1977 by Gordon J. Barclay and Ron Morris, published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2019.

“View of golfers on Leith Links with Martello Tower in background”. Watercolour sketch by Walter F. K. Lyon, 1889. Neil Hynd bequest via Trove.Scot, DP312460

In fact it does not seem that the Tower was ever actually re-armed to defend the Port against intrusion from the sea ever again. The citizens of Leith were however left with a curious object to explore, one which was easily accessible at low tide, and it became a source of fascination for generations of children. The picture below shows the scale of the abandoned fortification. Check out the boy in his swimmers looking over the parapet!

The Martello Tower at low tide, from “Martello Towers Worldwide” by W. H. Clements

But that was not quite the end of the story for the Tower as a defensive position and it finally went to war in 1939 when it was reconfigured to act as an anti-aircraft gun platform. The insides were modified with hastily-built brick partition walls to reduce the risk of blast damage and on the top were mounted three concrete and cast iron positions for the guns.

Concrete gun bases and cast iron pedestals on the roof of the Tower in 1971. Trove.Scot SC495681

After the war the Tower’s splendid isolation out at sea was about to be terminated. From the late 1930s onwards the Leith Docks Commissioners had been building vast new breakwaters around the harbour in an attempt to make it non-tideal and they were slowly edging towards the tower. By 1951 it was still outside the sea wall, but only just.

1951 aerial photo of the Martello Tower, from NCAP, showing ongoing land reclamation work behind it

The sea wall finally enclosed the tower in 1972 and with the land behind being built up by reclamation it appeared to be sinking lower and lower into the ground, when in reality the ground was rising higher and higher around it. The diagram below indicates just how deeply the tower was buried within the new docklands.

1972 cross section of the Tower

The slow march of Leith Docks out towards the Firth of Forth can be visualised in the below animation based on maps. It also shows how useful a defensive position the tower initially was when it was built, any ship wanting to enter the docks had to come around the Eastern and Middle Craigs and the Black Rocks, therefore had to pass close by the Tower’s guns.

We can no longer get anywhere near the Tower thanks to the stringent security at the docks, which has been stepped up significantly in recent years. Forth Ports, the current landowner, used to open it once a year to visitors but it’s been around a decade since anyone was afforded that privilege as far as I know. But we can still see the tower in art, look at enough paintings of Leith Docks and it pops up again and again.

“Dutchman off Leith”, an 1820s painting. The Martello Tower can be seen on the left of the short, just to the right of the steam paddle ship. © Edinburgh City Libraries

And if you are ever fortunate enough to get the chance to get up close and personal with it, look out for the mason’s marks left behind by the Irish Navvies who were engaged in its construction:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/davydubbit/37503950394/in/album-72157688932723074/

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