AT sea and on land, the French under Napoleon Bonaparte had a few rough days in the beginning decades of the 19th century. The Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, masterminded by Admiral Lord Nelson, put paid to their oceanic ambitions with the destruction of the Combined Fleets of France and her ally, Spain.

Ten years later, the Duke of Wellington routed the French armies at Waterloo and Napoleon was retired to the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, later home to hundreds of other British prisoners during the Boer Wars.

While they lost the battles, an outstanding tradition of fort building ensured that the French won the war for the pre-eminence of their language in the military architecture.

So many terms for fortifications were French that dictionaries were necessary for their definition in other tongues. Even Bermuda did not escape and the Dockyard fortifications in the 1840s acquired a French ear, or orillion, now missing.

Like many things peculiar to Bermuda, all is not to expectations and only one orillion was ever to be found. Taking Casemate Barracks as the head and looking to Somerset, the orillion was the left ear located where the Shell Oil depot stands.

The right ear was never appended, but an outwork in its place was the very English "Right Advance". This unimaginative name indicated that the little fort was "in advance", or forward, of the main line of the Dockyard defences called the Land Front, an equally placid name.

There were three mini-forts in advance of the Land Front, the middle one being the Ravelin Tower and that next the South Orillion being the Couvre Port, or "door covering", another French term. The Right Advance survived the building of the Westgate facility some years ago and should ultimately be accessible to the public through its original entry tunnel from the yard at Casemates.

The Ravelin Tower was the central outwork, entered at first floor level across a bridge from Casemates, through the width of the Land Front. A collapsible drawbridge connected the Ravelin Tower to the Glacis, which was the cleared ground in advance of all the fortifications.

The drawbridge was one of several invented at Bermuda, which one officer claimed to represent the first advances in drawbridge design since the Middle Ages. It was like one of the toys that collapsed if you pressed up on the bottom of the stand, which supported a giraffe made of necklaces of beads and string.

If the enemy, possibly French but more likely American, was on the bridge, its ropework was released and the fiends spilled into the ditch. The collapsed bridge could then be winched back into place.

The Couvre Port, with its adjacent Orillion, guarded the only land entry into the Dockyard. Coming from Somerset way, the road did a dogleg to the east and then turned north to cross the bridge into the Couvre Port, its guns covering this approach with cannon and musket fire.

ON the north side of the little fort, another bridge led to the tunnel just by the South Orillion. The road then divided, the lower leading to the pillars of the dockyard gate, while the upper progressed up past Casemates, down the long rampart and across a pedestrian drawbridge to the Commissioner's House and the upper grounds of the Keep, the great fort at the northeast end of the Dockyard. Sadly, the Couvre Port and the South Orillion were destroyed about 1905 and the one cannot cover, nor the other listen for, the enemy ever again.

The South Orillion, being ear-like, projected out from the Land Front and was lapped by waters from Grassy Bay, as shown in the 1857 painting by an English officer stationed at Bermuda. A breakwater called the Short Arm formed an embayment in front of the Orillion and was protected by the guns of a rampart that ended the Land Front fortifications at the King's Wharf by the later Floating Dock. A batardeau wall blocked the main ditch of the Land Front between the Orillion and the Couvre Port.

Most of these wonderful features of the defences of the Dockyard gates were swept away by workmen building the South Yard in the first decade of the 20th century. The wharf was extended to the southwest and part of the Short Arm was buried.

All that is left is the rampart for riflemen, opposite the modern doors of the old Casemates Prison. The Ravelin Tower, half the Glacis, all of the Couvre Port (excepting that under the present roadway) and the South Orillion fell to the picks and hammers of quarrymen, supplying rubble for landfill for the new docks. Some of the stone was reshaped into the triangular wall with a round capping course that is the eastern boundary of Pender Road from Cockburn Cut Bridge to the Land Front. In recent decades, an industrial "park" has grown up in the area, adding little to the visual and heritage amenities of the historic Dockyard. To save the pillars of the Dockyard Gate, a proposal has arisen that would bring some of the traffic off Pender Road in a slipway over the area of the Couvre Port and the South Orillion.

WITH due attention to the remains of the past, this is an opportunity to save the Gate and enhance the heritage vistas at the only entrance to the Dockyard, now an asphalt parking lot, industrial yard, and casuarina jungle, with dollops of trash thrown in for good measure to make us feel at home.

Heritage preservation and enhancement should be the main business of the historic Dockyard: here is a possible chance to add to those amenities, but some seem to have only one orillion, which listens not.

Postscript: The author thanks Fay and Geoffrey Elliott for the illustration of Dockyard in 1857. Durward Cann, Hazel Richardson, Al Wilson and Rudolph Richardson kindly identified the trainmen from the article last week on the Bermuda railways.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. The views expressed here are his opinion and not necessarily those of the trustees or staff of the Museum. Comments can be sent to drharrislogic.bm, to PO Box MA 133, Sandys MABX, or by telephone at 734-1298.