Qualla: Vale Castle

Vale Castle: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Man vyi, Public domain. The graves of Russian soldiers lie just inside the walls of Vale Castle on the northeast corner of Guernsey. They died in 1799 of disease, not battle, six thousand Tsarist troops quartered at nearby Delancey during the wars against revolutionary France and never quite acclimated to a Channel Islands winter. Around their bones run earthworks built in 600 BC by Iron Age hill people, curtain walls thrown up in the eleventh century by monks who had just driven off pirates, and concrete machine gun pits poured by the Wehrmacht in the 1940s. Few places stack three thousand years of military anxiety this neatly into a single hilltop.

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Image: Man vyi | Public domain

Vale Castle: Iron Age Bones

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Man vyi, Public domain. Long before there was a castle, the hill above what is now St Sampson's Harbour had a double ditch and bank, a fortified Iron Age site from somewhere between 500 and 600 BC. Archaeologists have found pottery from that period under both the medieval outer bank and beneath the four...

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Image: Man vyi | Public domain

Vale Castle: Pirates and Monks

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheKaphox, CC0. In 1061 pirates landed and pillaged Guernsey. The islanders complained to Duke William of Normandy, the same man who five years later would conquer England. William sent a knight, Sampson D'Anneville, who drove the pirates off with help from the local monastery. As thanks, D'Anne...

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Image: TheKaphox | CC0

Vale Castle: Russians, Cannons, and a Long Cold War

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Man vyi, Public domain. After the medieval centuries the castle settled into a long late life as a coastal artillery position. The American Revolutionary War, by making France a British enemy again, prompted new barracks and ramparts. The French Revolution brought one 24-pounder and two 9-pounder cannon...

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Image: Man vyi | Public domain

Vale Castle: The Most Recent Layer

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Man vyi, Public domain. The Germans arrived in June 1940 and stayed five years. They saw the castle the way every previous occupier had, as the obvious hill from which to defend the eastern coast, and they fortified it. Tobruk pits, machine gun positions, a personnel shelter, a searchlight passage, a fi...

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Image: Man vyi | Public domain