The Martello Tower at L'Etacq

In this map you can see the tower at L'Etacq which presumably was demolished for the German bunker to be built. It's here in the 1913 ordnance survey map.

The British built eight true Martello towers in Jersey, three between 1808 and 1814, and five between 1834 and 1837. The German occupation forces destroyed one of the second group, L'Etacq, during World War II. It was built in 1832. The bunker now is used by Faulkner Fisheries.

I wondered if there were any photos of it, and sure enough there were.

Phil Bougeard has supplied me with photos of what it used to look like:

Jersey Temp Passe gave me this photo:

The Martello tower at L'Etacq, located at the northern end of St Ouen’s Bay in Jersey, was built between 1832 and 1834 by contractor John Benest at a cost of £840. It was part of a broader British coastal defence strategy during the 19th century, modelled on the Martello towers used along England’s south coast.

Key Details About the Tower

• Construction date: 1833 (within the 1832–1834 window)

• Builder: John Benest, a Jersey contractor

• Armament: Initially mounted a 32-pounder gun; by 1840, it had a 24-pounder on a traversing platform

• Garrison: Housed one sergeant and twelve men, with a magazine for 70 barrels of gunpowder

 Destruction by German Forces

• During the German Occupation of Jersey in WWII, the tower was demolished in 1944.

• It was replaced with Strongpoint L’Etacquerel, a fortified bunker designed to house a 10.5cm coastal gun, part of the Atlantic Wall defences.

This tower was one of several Martellos built in Jersey during the 1830s, reflecting British military engineering trends of the time.

“The Last Watch”

The sea was quiet that morning, unnaturally so. Émile Le Brocq stood at the edge of the shingle, his boat moored and idle, nets untouched. He’d fished these waters since boyhood, long before the Germans came, long before the tower at L’Etacq became a silhouette against the sky he trusted.

It had always been there—solid, stubborn, like the old men who built it. His grandfather had told stories of hauling stone for John Benest, of the tower’s gun that never fired in anger, only in drills and pride. To Émile, it was more than a relic. It was a marker, a memory, a guardian of the bay.

Now, it was rubble.

He’d watched them do it. Not quickly, not with ceremony. The Germans had brought their engineers, their explosives, their cold precision. No one was allowed close, but Émile had anchored offshore, pretending to mend a net while his heart frayed.

The blast came like a cough from the earth. Dust rose, then silence. The tower was gone.

Émile felt it in his chest—not just the shock, but the ache of something stolen. The tower had never harmed anyone. It had stood watch through storms and wars, indifferent yet loyal. Its destruction wasn’t strategy—it was erasure.

He lit his pipe with trembling fingers. Around him, the sea resumed its rhythm, as if nothing had changed. But everything had.

That night, he walked the beach alone. Where the tower had stood, there was only scorched stone and the beginnings of a bunker—angular, foreign, wrong. He knelt and picked up a fragment of granite, still warm. It fit in his palm like a memory.

“They think they own this place,” he whispered to the wind. “But they don’t know what they’ve broken.”

He buried the stone in the sand, a quiet act of defiance. Tomorrow, he’d fish again. He’d nod to the gulls and curse the tide and pretend not to notice the absence on the headland.

But he’d remember. And someday, when the island was free, he’d tell his grandson about the tower that watched the sea, and the day it fell—not to time, but to men who mistook silence for surrender.