Icho Tower
Icho Tower, on its rocky perch about a mile or so offshore, is nonetheless clearly visible and seen by road users daily from many points along the Coast Road in the south-east corner of Jersey. It looks quite small in comparison to the nearby and more frequently visited Seymour Tower, also offshore a little further east, and is to some, perhaps a little less interesting than the numerous Jersey Round (or Conway) Towers dotted around the Island. Icho does look different and doesn’t have the numerous musket loopholes or the roof top machicolations (mâchicoulis) for a reason.
Icho Tower was constructed slightly later than the Jersey Round Towers and for a different purpose. Generally the Round Towers were designed to prevent infantry which had landed on the Island from being able to progress further than the area of the beach, in other words, to hold them up until reinforcements arrived from elsewhere in the Island. Round Towers were manned by a squad of 12 infantrymen and an NCO armed with muskets and an 18-pounder carronade mounted on the roof. With the only access to these Round Towers via a ladder which was pulled inside behind the defenders, the carronade would have been used to fire upon an invader as the invading force came into range up the beach. However once the invading force got close enough to the Tower, the carronade couldn’t fire downwards and the defenders would take up positions at the musketry loopholes or at the machicolations on the roof to fire down at the invaders, even if they managed to get to the very base of the Tower walls.
The Round Towers were generally built in the 1780s, and seeing them now, one might have assumed that they were built on land behind the sea walls. However they were built on the foreshore at a time when the Island didn’t have sea walls which created a clear division between beach and land, and as a result a number of them succumbed to coastal erosion where sea walls were a late addition (i.e. St Ouen’s Bay where the main sea defences were not added until the 1940s, and indeed had a different primary purpose of a German built anti-tank wall). It can also be said that the Round Towers were generally built in positions around the coast where roads led from the beach inland and therefore one of the Towers’ purposes was to prevent the enemy being able to advance inland along that road.
Finally, some 25 years later, the final clutch of Martello towers at St Ouen’s Bay (L’Etac, Lewis and Kempt), La Collette and Victoria Tower, were built in the period just before Britain and France became allies and ended what was a six hundred and fifty year war between the two countries. But that is another story!
If you go to Icho Tower now, you will appreciate the difficulties that must have been encountered in building it. You can still see the remains of crude stone huts in which the quarrymen and masons building the tower in 1811 lived. They certainly didn’t get back to the “mainland” every day and were dependent on not only the weather but tides for supplies and to get on and off. You can see parts of the islet reduced by quarrying to produce the stone as well as masons’ initials carved into the rocks (they probably had plenty of time on their hands at the. You also see that there are only three windows and the door (accessed by a long ladder as all these towers were). But why three windows? I am pretty sure that they were to enable the garrison to see and receive signals from the adjacent towers. Two on the north side appear to face Platte Rocque and Seymour Towers respectively, and the one on the west seems to point towards Noirmont Tower and Fort Regent and Elizabeth Castle. It must be remembered that without telephone or radio at the time, line of sight signalling was imperative, and General Don, Lt. Governor of Jersey, as part of the massive military building programme at the time, included a network of signalling stations around the Island so that any invasion risk was quickly communicated.
The Tower has had a private tenant for many years who no doubt enjoys the solitude as well as a distinctly smelly seabird colony during their breeding season each year! The views are however magnificent for those who have carefully managed to get there, and there are no doubt some secret lobster holes at low tide and some good fishing when the tide is high!
This is my first Geocache, please be very carefull as the cache is very fragile and please place on the same place gently. Feel free to leave any comments. Please NO PICS of the cache, any pictures will be removed without warning. You will need tweezers to retrieve the log. Happy geocaching. Good Luck