Newlands Alert!

In July Grainger will be showing off their latest plans for the Newlands West of Waterlooville MDA housing development, they are asking for opinions from the public.

Times and Place:

Waterlooville Community Centre
Friday 9th July, 1.30pm - 7.30pm
Saturday 10th July, 10am - 3pm

The focus will be on Phase 1 and the details of the design of this phase.

A visit to Fort Nelson

Due to the excellent weather this month, I decided to cycle from Waterlooville to The Royal Armouries Museum on top of Portsdown Hill. The museum is in Fort Nelson one of a string of forts built in the 1860s to defend against a potential French invasion.

Interestingly the attack on Portsmouth was expected to come from inland so the main defences of all the forts was on the land side, in the case of Fort Nelson pointing towards the North. The weaker defences are on the South side of the forts and these are visible from Portsmouth.

The route I took wasn't exactly the most direct, but it was probably the easiest to do without much thinking. I simply took the London Road up to Widley then took the route along James Callaghan Drive and Portsdown Hill Road. Quite a lot of gentle uphill work there, but nearly all downhill back!
In fact on the way back from the Widley Junction to Purbrook you can pick up a lot of speed.

The cycle/bus lanes are great for cyclists, road traffic is kept well away from you. The round trip was about 12 miles.

Near the fort is the Nelson Monument. This was finished in 1808, three years after the battle of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson.

Of course the fort was named Fort Nelson because of proximity to the monument. Many people don't even know the monument exists and even if they had seen it, wouldn't know why it was there.

This is the view of the fort near the main entrance. Behind the redan wall would be the officers quarters. Note the lower floor has sash windows, whilst the upper floor has positions for guns.

Each gun would be flanked either side by riflemen who would fire at attackers whilst the main gun was being reloaded.

Also remember this is the weaker side of the defences and it wasn't expected that an attack would come from this direction.

This is one of the North facing defences, effectively the main defences. Attackers would have to come down the ramparts into the dry ditch and would be faced by a huge thick wall.

I took the photo standing on top of one of the caponiers, below would be gun positions ready to fire along the length of the wall. Every wall has similar guns trained along them so there would have been no where for an attacker to hide. Also the design was such that no defender could shoot their own men.

These are the defensive mortar positions They are well protected behind the walls under a lot of earthworks held up by the brickwork and arches seen here. The light in front of the mortars shows where the gap in the roof is and where they would fire out. Up on top brave officers would see where the enemy were and call out instructions to adjust the trajectories of the mortars.

The mortars would drop their balls or bombs onto the enemy in the fields beyond the fort ramparts.

This is above the mortars shown in the previous photo. The brick work in the grass is actually the gap out of which the mortars would fire out.

The position I took this photo is where officers would be monitoring the enemy positions and giving instructions to the mortar crews.

I like this photo because the mortar looks really tiny and the Nelson Monument can be seen in the distance. Because I took the photo near the ground and there are no people near by, the mortar looks quite close to the camera and about knee high.

The reality is the mortar is huge, each of the balls in that stack is waist high!  It's a bit like the Father Ted scene, 'These are very small, those are far away...'.

It is called Mallets Mortar and is located at the front of the museum.

There is a lot to see at the fort, if you are really interested in armaments then you'll need 3 to 5 hours to take it all in. I also recommend the guided tour, even if you do know your stuff.
I haven't shown here the galleries with every conceivable artillery piece you could imagine, I haven't shown the mock ups of the fort kitchen, and officers quarters, I haven't shown the tunnels and magazines and I haven't shown the 20th century weapons that are on display.

For more info visit the Museum site or the Palmerston Forts Society which also has a detailed photo tour of the fort.

Panorama of Portsmouth

I recently cycled to Fort Nelson on Portsdown Hill and will post about that later. Whilst on the hill I took a series of photos with my really cruddy digital camera with the idea of creating a panorama of Portsmouth. I came across some brilliant Open Source software called Hugin that managed to transform my cruddy photos into this amazing picture:

If you saw how bad the original series of photos were, you would realise how good Hugin is. I think I will be using it more in the future. It works on the basis of finding a number of control points in each picture, then manipulates the images to line up similar control points. It even compensates different exposures, colour etc.
There are also a lot of settings that can be changed to manipulate the type of view.
Click on the photo to see a bigger version.

Fishing tackle

For fans of fishing. Coopers Fishing Tackle shop has opened up in Mill Road, Waterlooville.

Waterlooville Poundland

I think it is obvious to everyone now that the old Woolworths premises will be used by Poundland.
The comments at The News sums up many peoples thoughts... 'Oh no, not another shop full of...'

But it made me think. How do they maintain prices at or below £1?

Here's my thoughts about how a 'pound' shop might keep £1 prices in 50 to 100 years from now:

1. Inflation goes up, prices go up, they sell progressively different products, always keeping them within £1. Eventually in 50 years or so, the only thing they can sell is single rubber bands, a single chewy sweet, a thimble full of shampoo etc for a £1 each.

2. They sell the same or similar products as today over the same timescale as scenario 1 and inflation in the UK goes up. They need to find progressively cheaper labour in foreign countries, exploit the cheapest resources etc. so eventually their suppliers set up factories in the middle of the Amazon Rain forest and employ the children from local tribes.

3. They manage to turn the UK into a communist dictatorship which sets £1 prices on all the products forever.

4. They manipulate the markets so that inflation remains stationary or we have deflation. Not much different to 3 really, since they would need enormous influence.

New Blogger features

Those of you that are blogger users may have noticed some new features (long over due).

There is a new flexible template feature, which includes more control over how a template works. I'm un-decided yet whether to use this. I think if I had known a few weeks ago, I would have used it, but now I have changed the template, I'll probably keep the current one, at least for a while.

A more interesting feature is the addition of stand alone pages. This has been available in Wordpress for a long time and Blogger have been slow to do the same. This is something I will be using, so the blog will change in the coming months. One obvious use will be to put the walk to Waterlooville map on its own page.

Windmill Biscwits

Having bought some flour at Bursledon windmill I decided to have a go at making some biscuits. I found a recipe for digestive biscuits and got the ingredients together:

Wholemeal flour
Porridge oats
Baking powder
Butter
Sugar
Salt
Milk

See recipe link for amounts and directions.
I used organic milk, butter, porridge oats and sugar.

Here are all the ingredients mixed up, excluding the milk. I just used my hands, that was fun. Haven't done that since helping my mother or grandmother in the kitchen.

This is where it went a bit pear shaped.
I added far to much milk, at first it looked OK but then puddles of milk appeared. Anyway it was all or nothing now, so no turning back.

When cutting out the shapes, the mixture was far to soggy. When I did the second batch I abandoned rolling/cutting and just grabbed some mixture, made it into a ball then flattened it.

First batch finished, turned out quite well.

Tea and biscuits. Actually they are more like wholemeal soft cookies. But very tasty, the amount of sugar was just right.

I think less milk and a thinner/flatter amount of mixture per biscuit would give a thinner crisp biscuit.
Or maybe a different recipe?