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Site of an artillery battery, depicted on the OS 2nd edition map, which also shows four war department boundary stones around the perimeter of the battery. In many ways this is a forgotten battery in Aberdeen's history. This battery was built in 1858 along with Torry Point Battery (NJ90NE 0013) (which was finished two years later) as part of a new scheme of defence for the harbour and city of Aberdeen. For a long time Aberdeen had been without any proper harbour defence. Negotiations for a new battery, or series of batteries, had been ongoing between the Town Council and the Board of Ordnance from 1806. The intermittent negotiations were eventually brought to a successful conclusion following the Crimean War, after which two plots of land, on the beach and at Torry Point were rouped (a form of public auction) to the Board of Ordnance (later the War Office). The contractors who built the beach battery were John Fraser and Son Co., whilst Farquhar and Gill were the plumbers who laid piping from Garvock street along the margin of the existing road towards the battery site. Care was taken that the Links were not damaged by any of the operations concerned with the construction. Garvock Street no longer exists but is in the area of Garvock Wynd. Much later on 5 March 1850 Colonel Skyring, the Commander of the Royal Engineers in the North of Britain wrote to the town clerk requesting permission to run a drain pipe from the toilets in the beach battery to the ordinary high water mark on the beach. The contract itself is in National Archives of Scotland. The beach battery when completed was a four gun battery. It does not occur on the Ordnance Survey map of 1867 to 1869, but does appear on the relevant 1901 sheet. From that source it appears to be an oblong structure. The battery itself survived until 1927. It was removed then as a consequence of plans first detailed and approved by the City Council in 1923 for development and extension of the beach for recreational purposes. The delay between the decision being outlined and then undertaken can be accounted for by two main reasons. First, the Council had decided that as far as possible the demolition work was to be undertaken by unemployed labour, so a number of applications had to be made to the Unemployment Grants Committee to fund the work. Second, permission also had to be sought from the War Office in London.
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Historic Environment Records (HER) 
Aberdeen City
HER -
NJ90NE0231 - ESPLANADE, ABERDEEN