The entrance to the Bermuda Dockyard, headquarters of the North America and West Indies Station of the Royal Navy in the nineteenth century, was originally a complicated access comprised two ditches, an outwork fort, a rampart to the Great Wharf and three guarded gateways, of which only the innermost survives.In the past few years, several photographs have come to light, which allow us to interpret the missing parts of the entrance to a higher degree than previous.One of the missing pieces of the body of the fortifications of the Dockyard is its ‘orillon’, which name is derived from the French for ‘ear’.So we may say that Dockyard’s ‘Ear’ was chopped off at the beginning of the 1900s, when the yard was extended to the south to accommodate the larger, ‘Dreadnought’ class of warships then coming on-stream, representing a tsunami of change as the wrought iron and coal ships of the previous generation gave way to modern monsters in steel, powered by oil.But that is steaming a bit ahead of ourselves, so let us look at the area of the Dockyard gates before 1809, when the British Government compulsorily purchased all the lands of Ireland Island from their Bermudian owners. Then let us look at the area by a series of dates.1617 until 1809In the Richard Norwood survey of Bermuda, executed around 1617 and published in the remarkable series of maps, starting with that of John Speed in 1626, the island was divided generally into 25-and 50-acre lots for the shareholders of the Bermuda Company, bigwigs like the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Devonshire, as well as other lesser mortals, as in the Hayden of the Somerset land.Ireland Island, like the ‘General Land’ that comprised all of what is now St. George’s Parish, appears not to have been subdivided then.By the time of the great Hurd Survey, completed in 1797, there were four houses and farms on Ireland Island North, one on the Commissioner’s House hill, one by the original Grassy Bay cove and the other two by the area of the Dockyard Gates and further sought towards Cockburn Cut.In 1809, the owners and families of those farms, and all such homes throughout Ireland Island, were forced to sell out and leave their ancestral homes, as happened elsewhere in Bermuda at other times, the last large eviction being on the lands given over for Kindley Field and our only land airport.1810 until about 1827As we now know from recent archival and archaeological data, the first defences of the Dockyard comprised a ditch cut right across Ireland Island, south to north on the line now delineated by Casemate Barracks, with but a single drawbridge and entrance.On the site of the Barracks in this period stood a small fort, and next to the Grassy Bay coast was a substantial stone guardhouse.All of these features were swept away, probably beginning as early as 1827, to make way for the massive ‘Land Front’ fortifications, as determined by a plan of the Royal Engineers, approved by the then Master General of Ordnance, Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, of Waterloo fame.1827 until 1901In the 1820s, the economy of Bermuda exploded, to use a military simile, as the defences of the Dockyard came up for renewal and six major forts in St George’s Parish were under extended construction.The like of that building boom was not to be repeated until late in the century and again in 1941-45, when the US Forces appeared to build an airfield and naval base.Much of the stone for the 1800s works was the hard rock of Ireland Island, which can yet be seen in the walls of Forts Catherine, Victoria, Albert and Cunningham, and the Martello Tower at Ferry Point.We collectively owe much from those days to the enhancement of Bermuda from the investments of the British military in the island, investments that were largely denied to the West Indies, as the French threat there had evaporated.The plan for the defences of the Dockyard on its southern end called for the razing of the existing ditch and fort and the construction of a ‘Land Front’ of massive proportions, supported by three outwork forts, and connected to the ‘Keep’ (the largest fort in Bermuda at ten acres) by a long rampart on the north boundary of the working shipyard, now to be enclosed by fortifications on three sides, except to the east where it faced the major anchorage of Grassy Bay.The three outwork forts from south to north were the ‘Couvre Porte (‘covered door’, or protected entrance to Dockyard), the Ravelin Tower and the Right Advance.The first two were unfortunately demolished in the extension of the Dockyard that began in 1901, and the last would have been destroyed in the building of a new prison in the 1980s, but fortunately was not.Had it survived into the modern tourism era, the Couvre Porte would have a delight for visitors, for in order to get into the Dockyard on the main road, a drawbridge would take one into the fort, then another would be traversed into a tunnel of the South Orillon, from whence one could turn left up the hill to Casemate Barracks and ultimately the Commissioner’s House, or go through the Dockyard Gate, to the right of which was the Southwest Rampart, which blocked off the Great Wharf and provided for the defence of the south coast of Ireland Island to the south of the dockyard fortifications.Sadly, the Orillon and the Rampart were demolished in the new works of the first decade of the 1900s, although aspects of both may survive under the modern Pender Road, as indicated in the drawing.1910 until 2013So the Couvre Porte, the SW Rampart and the Orillon (Dockyard’s ‘Ear’) were unfortunately lost in the new works of the early 1900s, a considerable lost to history and the Cultural Tourism trade.The demolition of the wonderful Smitheries buildings, where now stands a yard of stored yachts, followed in the early 1970s, and the Casemate Barracks was not enhanced by turning it into a prison (1963—94).However, restoration is now the key word in the historic Dockyard, which is administered by the West End Development Corporation, so while we have lost an ‘ear’ and other significant features through one cause or another, the heritage head of the historic district is largely intact and hopefully will remain so, when fully restored, for centuries to come.