Fort Rinella, the battery built around one giant gun

Some forts are built to defend a city, others to defend a gun. Fort Rinella belongs in the second group. The whole structure, ditch, caponiers and underground galleries included, exists to house and protect a single 100-ton piece of artillery, and it’s still there.

Why Britain shipped a 100-ton gun to Malta

The story starts in Italy. In 1873 the Italian navy launched two battleships, the Duilio and the Dandolo, protected by 22 inches of steel armour and each carrying four Armstrong 100-ton guns. According to the Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna, they outclassed anything any other navy had. For Britain, watching the Mediterranean closely since the Suez Canal opened in 1869 because it was the route to India, that was a threat.

A military commission visited Malta and Gibraltar and recommended two 100-ton guns for each. In Malta two sites were picked at the mouth of the Grand Harbour, and two identical batteries went up, one at Sliema and one at Rinella. Between 1878 and 1886 all four of the series were built, two here and two in Gibraltar. For the harbour’s defences as a whole, see Malta’s forts and fortifications.

The gun’s journey and the first mechanical battery

The gun now at Rinella arrived from Woolwich on 10 September 1882. Some months later it was ferried from the dockyard to Rinella Bay and then hauled by hand to the fort. It took about 100 men of the 1st Brigade Scottish R.A. Division three months. In January 1884 it was finally in position.

It was mounted en barbette on a wrought-iron sliding carriage, so it fired over the parapet without exposing the gunners. Too big to work by hand, it was traversed and loaded by an ingenious hydraulic system, which is why Wirt Artna calls Rinella the first battery to have a gun worked by mechanical means. For me that detail is worth the visit more than the sheer size.

The fort is an irregular pentagon inside a deep ditch, covered by three caponiers and a counterscarp gallery. Underground were the magazine and two loading chambers; at ground level, the accommodation and the machinery rooms.

Did it ever fire?

Never at an enemy. In 1906, after only twenty years’ service, Britain’s 100-ton guns were declared obsolete. Rinella was stripped of its machinery and abandoned. Until the mid-1930s it served as a position-finding station for nearby Fort Ricasoli, then passed to the Admiralty and, in 1965, to the Government of Malta. Since 1991 Wirt Artna volunteers have been restoring it, with the aim of turning it into a living museum.

The website’s slogan, see the world’s largest cannon, is the fort’s own claim. I’ll stick to what can be checked, an Armstrong 100-ton gun on its original emplacement, which is quite enough.

Is it worth it next to the Knights’ forts?

It’s a fair question, as Malta is hardly short of forts. My answer is that Rinella doesn’t compete with them, because it tells a different era. Fort St Angelo in Birgu and St Elmo are the story of the Knights and their sieges; Rinella is the 19th-century naval arms race, with Italy, Suez and the route to India in the background. If you’ve only seen the Order’s forts, this one shows you British Malta from the inside, and for a British visitor there’s a particular interest in seeing how far the Royal Navy went to hold on to this harbour.

It’s also a guided visit with re-enactments rather than a wander through empty rooms, which makes it an easy sell to teenagers. I’d put it in a day given over to Kalkara, next to the Three Cities, with Esplora for the younger ones.

Tickets, hours and getting there

Adults (16 and over) pay €14, seniors and students €12, children from 5 to 15 €7, and a family ticket is €28. Included in that are a guided tour, a film about the fort and its gun shown roughly on the hour, and the historical re-enactments. It’s open from 09:30 until 17:30 every day except Sunday, with last admission at 16:00, and the foundation suggests at least two hours. The desk takes cards only.

Bus 3 from Valletta terminus stops outside the main gate, every half hour Monday to Saturday. With children, Esplora, Malta’s science centre, is close by and fits into the same morning. And if you’re doing more of the foundation’s sites, such as the Malta at War Museum in Birgu, work out whether its Heritage Pass pays.