Fort Rinella

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Fort Rinella is a Victorian fortification on the island of Malta. It is also referred to as the Rinella Battery in some maps and publications.

[edit] History

It was built by the British between 1878 and 1886 and stands above the shore east of the mouth of Grand Harbour, between Fort Ricassoli and Fort St Roca.

The fort was built to contain a single Armstrong 17.72 inch rifled muzzle loading 102 ton gun, which is still in place.

The fort was originally one of pair, the paired Cambridge Battery fort near Tigne west of Grand Harbour no longer exists.

A similar pair of guns were installed when Victoria Battery (1879) and Napier of Magdala Battery (1883) were built to defend Gibraltar. These were built without the self defence capabilities of Rinella.

The 100 Ton Armstrong Gun

The fort is modest in size since it was designed to operate and protect the single large gun, with its associated gun crew, magazines, bunkers, support machinery and the modest detachment of troops stationed within the fort to defend the installation.

The fort was designed to engage enemy warships at ranges up to 7000 yards. The low profile of the fort and the deeply buried machinery rooms and magazines were intended to survive counterfire from capital warships.

In contrast the secondary armament of the fort is minimal, with no fixed secondary guns, simply ditches, caponiers, a counter-scarp gallery and firing points intended mostly for small arms fire and grenades.

The massive gun is far too heavy to be laid by hand, and the fort therefore contained a steam powered hydraulic system that traversed, elevated and depressed the gun, operated a pair of hydraulic powered loading and washing systems, and powered the shell lifts that moved the 2000 pound shells and 450 pound blackpowder charges from the magazines into the loading chambers.

In the image above, one of the pair of iron casemates that protected the hydraulic loading and cleaning mechanism can be seen behind the gun.

The gun was intended to operate at a rate of fire of a single shell every four minutes. The firing cycle was for the gun to be traversed and depressed until it aligned with one of loading casemates, with the barrel pushing aside an iron plate that normally closed the aperture in the casemate. The gun was then flushed with water to cool it, clean any debris and deposit from the barrel, and douse any remaining embers from the previous cartridge. The ramming mechanism then inserted and tamped a silk cartridge containing the propellant charge, which was followed by one of the range of shells the gun was adapted to fire. The loaded gun was then traversed and elevated using the hydraulic system, and fired by an electrical firing mechanism. The gun then slewed to the other casemate to repeat the loading process, while the first casemate was recharged from the deeper magazine.

The two separate loading casemates, each fed by an independent magazine, and the provision of man powered backup pumps for the hydraulic system, such that a team of 40 men could maintain the hydraulic pressure to operate the gun, would have allowed the fort to continue firing even if substantially damaged.

Though as originally built the inner faces of the emplacement were revetted with masonry, review of the forts defences after its completion identified this as a weakness, and the stone revetting was removed from most of the emplacement and replaced with plain earthworks, presumably to better absorb the energy of incoming shellfire. The revetting was retained around the loading casemates, as can also be seen in the image above.

The 100 ton guns were in active service for only 20 years, with all being withdrawn from active service by 1906, without ever firing a shot in anger.

After the Armstrong gun was retired from service Fort Rinella was used as a sighting point for the guns of Ricasoli Fort, and unfortunately at some point the now obsolete steam engine and hydraulic system were removed from Fort Rinella.

[edit] Present day

Since 1991 the fort has been undergoing restoration and is open to the public as a Museum, though the steam engine and hydraulics machinery have not yet been replaced.