A recent discovery has caused researchers to re-evaluate their historical accounts.

Last Friday during excavation work on the widening of Pender Road at Dockyard, an original gun emplacement was found under a later one at the extreme southern end of the land front fortifications.

Executive director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum, archaeologist Edward Harris was on hand to record the find.

He said: "The gun emplacement of the 1830s was centered on an old cannon that had been placed upright between two massive carved stones, in order to take the recoil from gun and carriage when it was fired.

"The operational cannon would have been on a carriage that was itself on a slide. The slide could be moved from side to side on circular metal rails, now missing, that were set into blocks of hard limestone quarried in the dockyard.

"This discovery will cause us to re-evaluate other gun emplacements in the Dockyard, which were thought to be originals from the 1830s, but are now probably from the rearmament of the Dockyard in the 1870s."

Archaeological work has been taking place on the weekends by Bermuda Maritime Museum volunteers to restore parts of Dockyard to its original state in hopes of opening it as a heritage and tourism site.

Completion is set for April of this year.