There are mounted altogether on the Land Front and its outworks four 32-pdrs, fourteen 24-pdr guns and eleven 24-pdr carronades, and in rear of it, covered by its ramparts is a Bombproof Barrack, constructed for 13 officers and 307 men, with tanks underneath for 120,000 gallons of water; and on the flanks of the barrack, but at a lower level, bombproof magazines for 2500 barrels of gunpowder, (but now unused owing to the dangerous proximity of the Dockyard new smitheries), and a range of bombproof buildings, containing Commissariat offices, storehouses, bakery, etc., and barrack stores.

¿ Colonel A. J. Hemphill, "Defence of Bermuda, 1857"

A little over two years ago, Lt. Col. David Burch, OBE (mil), ED, JP, then chairman of the West End Development Corporation, kindly allowed the Maritime Museum to embark on an archaeological "pre-restoration" project at the Casemate Barracks.

This became a Saturday morning exercise, aided by a small grant from the Corporation, to remove the decaying vestiges of the high-security "Casemates Prison", a more useful and physically rewarding expenditure of energy than going to the gym (cheaper too). Before explaining the nature of the work carried out by the volunteers, a historical review of the Casemates complex may be of interest.

The name of Casemate Barracks, the first word in the singular, derives from the construction of the roof of the barracks and its two adjacent ordnance buildings. Like the largest gunpowder magazine of this period-that is to say, the 1830s-1850s, the twilight decades of smoothbore artillery-in the Keep, where the Museum is located, the buildings had a "casemated" roof up to five feet thick.

This was formed by constructing an arch of brick, the underside of which becomes the ceiling of the building. The upper side of the arch of some six layers of brickwork was levelled with concrete or mortar, to make the whole structure "bombproof" against incoming cannonballs from the American forces, then the designated enemy.

The casemated construction was often used to make underground gun emplacements, whereby the bricks and mortar were further strengthened by several feet of earth. In the two ordnance buildings at the Casemates complex, the brickwork of the roofing arches is apparent on the facades, but at the barracks, it is hidden behind a course of hard Bermuda limestone, where false windows also mask the construction form of the roof. Hence, it is a "casemated barracks" and could have served as a fort, perhaps the last stand, or "Alamo", of the Dockyard, if the Yankees were overrunning the place.

The phasing of the construction of the Dockyard proceeded in this timeline. First, wooden buildings were erected on the shore of Grassy Bay, starting in 1809; secondly, the fortifications were begun shortly thereafter, but not completed until the mid-1840s; thirdly, the great Commissioner's House was constructed, followed by (fourthly) the making of the Casemates complex and finally, after 1847, all the stone buildings in the Dockyard proper were amassed.

That makes the Casemate Barracks the second oldest historic building of the Bermuda Dockyard and as Ian Stranack wrote in The Andrew and the Onions in 1978: "One of the best known structures is the barracks, standing high above the south wall and visible for many miles. This was originally built as the Ordnance Barracks, post-1829 and pre-1843, by the Army.

"All of the buildings in the Dockyard are constructed on a grand scale . . . No expense seems to have been spared to ensure that the workmanship was of an exceptionally high standard, and it is thanks to this that these fine buildings are in such good general order today."

The same standard could not be found in the additions made to Casemate Barracks, when it was converted to a prison, in use for 30 years from the mid-1960s. Part of the pre-restoration project was to remove the largely concrete vestiges of the prison, all of which were recorded photographically before demolition by hand or machine. The watchtowers on two corners at roof level of the barracks, for example, could only be taken down by hand, accomplished by teams led by Jim Butterfield and Clive Hook.

Looking towards Somerset and over the gun emplacements and ramparts of the Land Front, the Casemates complex is comprised of the Lower Ordnance Yard (next to the main road), the Casemate Barracks and to the west, the Upper Ordnance Yard. All these buildings contained prison constructions and were encircled with barbed and razor wire, in the usual prison style.

The volunteers removed much of those legacies of Casemates Prison, but much remains to be done. Before, during and after, the situation was recorded photographically, as an archive of the modern history of the site, the object of the pre-restoration project being to take the Casemates complex back to its original design of the late 1830s.

Once that was accomplished, a team of experts in remote sensing appeared from the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science, University of Vienna, Austria, with a RIEGL LMS Z420i laser scanner. This top of the line instrument can record everything within its beam for 360 degrees and up to 800 metres, with an accuracy of less than a centimeter. You could say this is "surround sonar", like the all-encompassing "surround sound" of your stereo.

The area being scanned produces a cloud of survey points on the computer screen, which extremely accurately have recorded all the dimensions of the buildings and landscape around the instrument. This system is exceptionally useful in recording the interior of buildings, which are three-dimensional, as opposed to the two dimensions of facades. A digital camera also rotates with the scanner and therefore the "cloud" can be dressed in colour, as seen in the images published here.

Dr. Wolfgang Neubauer led the team of Austrians, who had just come from recording the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid in this high-tech manner, which some now consider to be essential to archaeological projects. It might be said that it is presently impossible to record the buildings and landscape of the Casemates complex in any better way they carried out with the RIEGL laser scanner. That recording was an essential part of the pre-restoration work on this very historical group of dockyard buildings.

Interest in the Casemate Barracks complex is very high locally and a number of tours have been made over the last two years, several for the Department of Cultural Affairs for Heritage Month 2007. We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the volunteers and to specialists, such as the team from the University of Vienna, who have given freely and extensively of their time, and in some cases, funds, to help in the "pre-restoration" project to bring "These Old Houses" back to the glory of their original design for the enjoyment of all.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. This article represents his opinions and not necessarily those of persons associated with the Museum. Comments can be sent to drharrislogic.bm or by telephone to 799-5480.