Corsica: Towers of power for defence of the realm

A windy headland in Corsica is not the obvious place to find an important piece of our military heritage. But that's where Jonty Bloom discovered the original Martello tower, a cylindrical fort whose design Britain adopted to protect her shores

Corsica isn't on every British sun-seeker's list, but for my wife Karen and I it is perfect. She is mad about islands and I love France. Flying from Gatwick to Bastia we picked up a hire car quickly and easily and headed over the mountains to our villa on the other side of the island, just outside the small port of St Florent.

Corsica is all you would expect of a Mediterranean island; sun, sea and sand, but it is also large enough to have plenty of interesting and varied scenery. And if you, like me, can't manage more than a week by the pool without going mad with boredom, there is more ­ a marvellously varied and bloody history. From the balcony of our villa we could see Mortella Point and the remains of one of the most famous forts in history. So we decided we should do some local sightseeing and combine some exercise with a dip into every aged schoolboy's favourite subject, military history.

There are two ways to get to the fort. The easier one is to get a boat to the beautiful Lodo Plage and walk back along the coast for an hour. But we decided to try the tougher option, a four-hour hike there and back from St Florent. After a week of sunbathing in perfect weather we set out at 6 o'clock one morning to avoid the blistering midday sun. However, that day it was overcast and after half an hour it started to drizzle just as we reached a split in the path. Which is when we realised that neither of us had remembered to bring the map.

We pressed on and found the right path. After another hour we stopped for a drink. Rather cleverly, I thought, I had frozen our drinking water so that it would defrost nicely in the intense heat. But on this, the one dull day of our holiday, my plan had an obvious flaw. We shared a few drops of semi-liquid slush and continued on just as the rain started to come down like stair rods.

After two hours we reached the fort.Now, if Mortella Point in Corsica doesn't ring a bell that's no surprise; spelling in Georgian England obviously wasn't considered an important skill. But during the long wars with France, military architecture was, and it was on this beautiful, windswept and remote headland that the Royal Navy first came across a style offort that came to be known as a Martello tower.

It is one of many identical towers around the wild and remote Corsicancoast in the early 16th century to fight off pirates and prevent the locals from indulging in their favourite pastime of smuggling.

In 1794 the fort, manned by a French garrison and with just three guns, fought off two British warships. Only when attacked from the land did the fort finally fall.

The Navy was so impressed by the ability of this simple, round tower to resist attack that when Britain was later in dire need of some cheap and effective coastal defences of its own, the Martello tower came to mind. In 1803 Captain William Ford proposed a chain of Martello towers to defend England against possible invasion from Napoleon's army. Subsequently 74 were built on the south coast, many of which still survive.

Martello towers spread around the world with the British Empire, and can be found today in Canada, the West Indies, India, Australia and Mauritius.

They even made it as far as the United States: East Martello Tower in Key West is now a museum. It was built in 1862 but new technology ­ the rifled cannon and explosive shells – made it obsolete before it was even completed.

The Martello tower in Dun Laoghaire, near Dublin, is the setting for the opening scene of James Joyce's Ulysses. Today it houses the James Joyce Museum and every year on Bloomsday (16 June, the day on which the novel is set) is the centre of a celebration of the novelist's work.

That night in Corsica, over an excellent fish soup at L'Atrium Restaurant in St Florent I admitted to Karen that I had put the wrong film in the camera. As we didn't have a slide projector we would have to go back to the tower. She took it very well and the next day, in brilliant sunshine, we took the boat.

Jonty Bloom is a business reporter for the BBC.