Braefoot Point Battery, Blockhouse No.3 (Inner Ring)

A project to characterise the quantity and quality of the Scottish resource of known surviving remains of the First World War. Carried out in partnership between Historic Scotland and RCAHMS.

This record formerly covered two pillboxes 225m apart; Pillbox No. 1 (Inner Ring) is now described elsewhere (see NT18SE 25.10).

This brick-built pillbox (referred to as a blockhouse on a 1918 OS plan), which was one of six in an inner ring of such structures that defended the Braefoot Point gun battery in World War One, is situated at the eastern corner of the Inner Ring defences, on the crest of a very steep and high escarpment overlooking Braefoot Bay to the SE. The structure is an irregular hexagon on plan with the rear wall (0.35m thick) on the W containing only a bricked-up doorway (0.92m wide). Of the shorter other sides, those on the NW, SW and SE each contain four embrasures, with the SW and SE embrasures blocked. Those on the E and NE contain only three, also blocked. All the embrasures measure 0.3m in width and 0.52m in height. The walls rise 2.17m from a thick (at least 0.45m) concrete raft to a concrete roof that measures 0.13m in thickness at its outer edge. Within the interior of the pillbox a steel I-beam running from E to W supports the roof. At the corners of the pillbox immediately N and S of the entrance respectively there are traces of where the 10ft palisade (3m high boundary fence) met the pillbox, and possibly carried over its flat roof.

One of the functions of this pillbox was to provide fire along the front of the boundary fence both to the NW and to the SW. To the NW the line of fire only extended some 22m to a point where the fence changed angle. However, to achieve this effective line of fire the natural ground level has had be lowered to such an extent that the fence was eventually erected along the middle of a broad trench measuring around 5.5m in breadth and up to 1.5m in depth at its SE end, tailing off where it reached the angle in the fence. It is not clear how far the line of fire to the SW was, but on this side a clear line of sight has been achieved by the creation below the natural crest of the escarpment of a 3m broad terrace along the centre of which the fence ran.

Visited by HES Archaeological Survey (J. Sherriff, A. McCaig), 9 August 2022.

Ordnance Survey 1918. 1:360 scale plan of Special Survey War Department Site at Braefoot Point, Fifeshire - NLS: MapArea.C18:13(05).

HES surveyed blockhouse no.3 (Inner Ring) at Braefoot Point Battery on 9 August 2022 with tape and laser distance measurer at a scale of 1:50. The resultant plan was redrawn in vector graphics software at a scale of 1:100.