xenith | The Military Zone

I was a bit optimistic thinking I could do this in one post, so I added some more photos and made it two!

Locational photo of the military area. The barracks, over the back, were demolished a long time ago. To the left was Rose Cottage, the senior officer's house. The orange/yellow cottage was the married officers quarters. To the right of this, in a smaller cottage now demolished, was the school for free children.

Looking from inside the house. It must have been a weird place to have grown up in.

The guard tower, built about 1835. The stone was carved by the boys across the water. I'm not sure how much of it they actually carved, because if the date is right, the tower was built just the year after the Point Puer settlement was established.

Upstairs, from memory there was storage and a magazine.

Downstairs, cells and a storage area.

Sandstone, at least the local variety, isn't the most robust of building materials, but it does weather into some interesting patterns.

An interesting thing about the design on the tower: it was apparently intended to have steps on either side, but it was built with just the one set and as the left-hand side is now, there doesn't seem to have been any allowance for those extra steps once constructed, yet in many painting and prints that otherwise seems accurate, the tower is shown with a symmetrical staircase. An example

This probably varies depending on the monitor, but on my screen, it's a perfect silhouette :)

Down Champ St just a little are the ruins of an office building that opens onto the road. They
re referred to as law courts, but I've seen other designations applied to them (like Commandant's Office, below). If I recall correctly, after the settlement closed, they were used as a hotel but burnt down in 1921. Now somewhere there is a photo of the building on fire. Here and here. (Images should be different, but the catalogue likes to load the same image on each page so watch it.)