Napoleonic Britain: A Guide to Fortresses, Statues and Memorials of the French Wars 1792-1815 David Buttery
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military (September 30, 2023)
Hardcover: 304 pages
ISBN: 9781399084376
This is the first guide to sites in the British Isles connected to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to be published. Stately homes, memorials, statues, dockyards, fortifications, tombs, churches, hospitals and museums associated with the wars are all described in vivid detail. There are hundreds of such sites with many of them being closely linked to military heroes like Wellington and Nelson and the forces they commanded.
High points include not only St Paul’s Cathedral, Nelson’s Column and Apsley House in London but more obscure monuments and buildings outside the capital like Edinburgh Castle, HMS Victory in Portsmouth Dockyard, the Western Heights Fortifications in Dover, Fishguard invasion site in Wales, Castlebar battlefield in Ireland and Martello towers along the English coastline. Many minor sites of great interest are listed too.
David Buttery’s guidebook gives the reader a fascinating insight into this long period of conflict between the British and the French and into the buildings, statues and memorials that commemorate it.
Author
David Buttery has established a reputation as a leading historian of nineteenth-century British military history and he has made a particular study of the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars. He has worked as a tour guide for several companies and has led tours of the Waterloo campaign battlefields.