THIS week we return to the coast and part of the Barry village at the Old Harbour.

Was there to be a greater building left of this old pre-building of the dock’s world; all before1884, than this old tower? In the Barry and District this week we turn to the ‘Watchtower’.

We are thankful to Richard Enos for the image taken.

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The watchtower was constructed on land once owned by the Romilly family and was in many ways in the 1860s, a statement of change. The old village of Barry, trapped in an age of anonymity and isolation, was now to have its very own modern watchtower, rocket shed (a separate building close by), looking over to an island; that would very soon be reconnected to mainland by the construction the Barry Dock.

The watchtower was built with fine dressed stone quoins (corner stones), with other dressed stone work for its fenestrations (windows) and doorways. The tower doesn’t stand out of place as it is sat on the local ancient carboniferous rock, and utilises some of these quarried stones in its construction. What really stands out however about our ‘watchtower’, is the way it utilises modern building techniques from the 1860s, but looks like a medieval church tower, with a corbelled parapet. These corbels are the stones that protrude slightly from the body of the tower near its top to support a low-lying parapet, enclosing a flat roof that if you are lucky enough you can stand upon and look at the views.

The watchtower was essentially a coastguard station, that contains a boat house on its ground floor, once opening out onto a slipway and now lost to erosion. Above the boat house on the first floor, accessible via a doorway from the low laying cliff line, contains a room that houses a fire place that exited smoke via the small chimney and stack above the flat floor.

The building had a relatively short use as a coastguard station, as times changed, the small harbour at Barry gave way to the huge port that was being constructed, and the operations of the coastguard service slowly moved to other locations. The glorious days of the tower being used to look out for ships in trouble were well and truly over by 1914, when we see the building referred too on the Ordnance Survey map as the ‘Old Watch House’, offering us a name that would be familiar to me as a child, for the location of the pebbly beach below, ‘Watch House Bay’, or Watchtower bay.

How many lives those at the watchtower actually saved is unknown, but the building still remains in use. It has been used as one of its purposes as an activity centre for the past hundred years, and is still maintained. Hopefully it will still be standing in 100 years’ time.

Many thanks for reading our history of the Barry and District this week, more to come next week.

Karl-James Langford FSAScot, MLitt

Archaeology Cymru