Casemate 77

There are hundreds of websites on fortification to be found on the internet and I have no intention of trying to do a definitive list, but am happy to mention some which I have found to be particularly rewarding, which I have discovered myself or which have been brought to my attention by members.

www.peterwardein.com the website of Nenad Seguljev and the Fortress Association of Serbia was mentioned in Casemate 76 p9; if you like C18th bastioned fortification, you will appreciate this website. Easy to navigate, well laid out with plans to reference the photos, and separate sections on old maps, prints, engravings, postcards, history, and other fortifications in the region.

www.nortfort.ru is the website of Alexey Gossachinsky, in St Petersburg, and his picture gallery of forts and guns will keep you busy for hours; Land fortresses and castles; Marine fortresses, forts and batteries; Fortified areas and Lines; Finland is included in each section and there are some cracking photos (from Stephen Cannon-Brookes).

www.forsvarsbygg.no/newsread/news.asp?N=5199&L=1 Svein Wiiger Olsen told me about the Norwegian military construction service (Forsvarsbygg), which has made a series of preservation plans for fortifications and military installations in Norway. They are now available as pdf-files on the internet. Each plan contains hundreds of pages and a large number of drawings, pictures and maps.
The three volumes of the national plan (Landsverneplanen) cover all parts of Norway, while others deal with specific fortifications (Bergenhus, Hegra, Oscarsborg etc.). To download the chapters of the Landsverneplanen you have to click on the name of the chapter in the list of contents of each volume.

www.atlantikwall-research-norway.de is another one from Svein and has plenty of pics and plans of the Atlantic Wall in Norway.

www.ra.se is a Swedish website Steve Butler told me about, which is great for finding old fort prints at reasonably high resolution, though not much beyond A5.

www.geoportail.fr is a new French website which has the whole of France and its overseas possessions on aerial photos down to 1:3000 detail. I understood it was much finer than this, but if so I haven't worked out how to get it. Possibly my inadequate French. It is not all that easy to navigate, and nothing like as versatile as:

Google Earth, which is not a website but an application, freely available to download. It is a treasure if you are on broadband; it can show terrain, angle the view and zoom close in, plus lots of other features. There is a problem in that by no means all of the globe is at anything like a high resolution, just a seeming random series of patches splattered all over the world, including most major towns, but the numbers are growing and what is not high res today might be tomorrow. San Juan, Puerto Rico and Valenca do Minho were not high res, now they are. Quality of image is variable too. I have spent an unseemly number of hours fort hunting - my favourite bastion forts are ideal owing to shape and scale; castles are good too - and have filed hundreds of pictures from around the world. Many American seacoast forts can be found; Plymouth, Portsmouth, Falmouth and Chatham too, and I found all of Brest and Lorient for our Tour. I can use the images in Casemate too. Have fun.