The Collaborative International Dictionary
Martello tower \Mar*tel"lo tow`er\ [It. martello hammer. The name was orig. given to towers erected on the coasts of Sicily and Sardinia for protection against the pirates in the time of Charles the Fifth, which prob. orig. contained an alarm bell to be struck with a hammer. See Martel.] (Fort.) A building of masonry, generally circular, usually erected on the seacoast, with a gun on the summit mounted on a traversing platform, so as to be fired in any direction.
Note: The English borrowed the name of the tower from Corsica in 1794.
WordNet
n. a circular masonry fort for coastal defence
Wikipedia
Martello towers, sometimes known simply as Martellos, are small defensive forts that were built across the British Empire during the 19th century, from the time of the French Revolutionary Wars onwards. Most were coastal forts.
They stand up to high (with two floors) and typically had a garrison of one officer and 15–25 men. Their round structure and thick walls of solid masonry made them resistant to cannon fire, while their height made them an ideal platform for a single heavy artillery piece, mounted on the flat roof and able to traverse, and hence fire over, a complete 360° circle. A few towers had moats or other batteries and works attached for extra defence.
The Martello towers were used during the first half of the 19th century, but became obsolete with the introduction of powerful rifled artillery. Many have survived to the present day, often preserved as historic monuments.
In the second half of the 19th century, there was another spate of tower and fort building, during the premiership of Lord Palmerston. These fortifications are therefore correctly called the Palmerston Forts, although, because they are circular in design, some confuse them with Martello towers.
Martello Tower is a rock high, lying in King George Bay north-north-west of Lions Rump, in the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. It was charted in 1937 by Discovery Investigations personnel on the Discovery II, who named it after the fortified towers of that name.
The Martello Tower in Hambantota, is a small circular shaped fort, inspired by the Martello tower (a 15th century fort at Mortella (Myrtle) Point in Corsica that survived an attack by the British Royal Navy in 1794).
The tower was built between 1804 and 1806 to protect the harbour and settlement at Hambantota, following an unsuccessful attack by Kandyan insurgents in 1803. Construction of the tower is credited to a Captain Goper of the Engineers Corp (however no individual by that name appears in the British Army records). The commanding engineer in Ceylon at the time of the tower's construction was Captain Bridges, who was involved in the design of a similar Martello tower in Simon's Town near Cape Town, South Africa in 1796, which the tower in Hambantota closely resembles.
In September 1803 stopped briefly at Hambantota, where she dropped off an eight-man detachment from the Royal Artillery, who reinforced the British garrison there and later helped it repel a Kandian attack.
The Martello tower is , with a base diameter of and thick walls. It has an unusual projecting rim around the parapet. Similar to English towers the entrance to the fort was through a doorway on the first floor but unlike others the Hambantota tower has a number of loopholes. The ground floor contained a storeroom and magazine. The tower's armaments included two 6-pounder-, three 3-pounder, and a number of 2 and 1-pounder guns. In 1813 a 5-1/2 inch howitzer replaced most of the small guns, and in 1814 two 18-pounder guns were added.
The tower was restored in 1999. In the past, the tower housed the Land Registry of the Hambantota Kachcheri. Today it houses a fisheries museum.
Usage examples of "martello tower".
So if one Martello tower can do that to two men-of-war, while at the same time it keeps off fourteen hundred soldiers, just think what Grimsholm, much higher, fifty times as strong, and with no soldiers to worry about, could do.
This is called a Martello tower, but I could not learn who built it.
A faint yellow light in the west showed the links, on which a few figures moving toward the clubhouse were still visible, the squat martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the pale ribbon of sands intersected at intervals by black wooden groynes, the dim and murmuring sea.
Out of the residential area now, we put our heads down and our rumps in the air and rocketed east along AlA, Smathers Beach on our right now, all the way until we passed the East Martello Tower museum and could see the road ahead begin to curve north.
So the seaman prattled away about the Town Hall and the Martello Tower, and the Esplanade, and Pitt Street and the High Street, until his companion suddenly shot out a long eager arm and caught him by the wrist.
The Martello tower, black in the distance, squatted against the sky like a warning.