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Site of a beach battery, 1780. This was Aberdeen's first 'modern' battery built after the old medieval Blockhouse was considered to be insufficient for the purposes of defending Aberdeen Harbour. The following entry occurs in the Council Register for 7 October 1780: 'The said day the Council considering that Captain Fraser Engineer in Chief for Scotland and Captain Marr had both some months ago both visited and inspected the Entry of the Harbour and had pitched upon a piece of ground apon the Bents nearly opposite to the Pocra Pier as a proper place for erecting a Battery for Defence of the Entry of the Harbour and had advised that the cannon sent to the Town by Government should be placed theron and that Captain Fraser had stalked out the ground and had promised to transmit to the Magistrates a plan of the proposed battery...' . The entry continues that the Council will provide ammunition for the guns there, as advised by the military, and that the treasurer would pay the expenses incurred. The battery was then filled with cannons, from an entry in the Council Register for 1782 we can see that it took around fifteen trained men to operate the cannons in the battery. By 1806 the battery had been allowed to degenerate to the point where it was useless in terms of its primary function. The Board of Ordnance recognised that this was the case and sought to do something about it. In December 1806, an official of the Board wrote to the Provost of Aberdeen stating that the battery was 'very much out of repair...'. The then Provost, Brebner, replied that the Council had no authority over the battery, nor had they the money necessary to carry out the repairs that were called for. Here begins the long drawn out series of intermittent correspondence that eventually ends with the construction of new batteries on the beach and at Torry Point in 1858-1860. It is unclear when the 1780 battery was finally dismantled. The battery is depicted on Smeaton's 1789 map of Aberdeen.
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Historic Environment Records (HER) 
Aberdeen City
HER -
NJ90NE0257 - ESPLANADE, ABERDEEN